A young black journalist returning to find his roots in Mississippi makes the unsurprising discovery that circumstances there have been generally unfavorable to African-Americans. Walton grew up in the 1960s and '70s in a middle-class Chicago suburb where civil rights seemed on the move. To Walton's parents, Mississippi represented the poverty and inequality that they had struggled to escape; for the young Walton, Mississippi was something dark and sinister, ``perhaps the most loaded proper noun in American English.'' So when he was older and going through a difficult time in New York City, the young man determined to confront his devils, thinking that by resolving his issues with Mississippi he could fix what else was broken in his life. Unfortunately, it didn't work out that way. In fact, Walton realizes after his journey that race relations are worse than he'd even imagined and that the progress of history is a myth. Walton demonstrates his epiphany by telling the story of Mississippi from pre-Columbian times to the present—but it reads like the textbook for American Civilization 101. In between, he transcribes interviews with Mississippi residents, both white and black, tells his own family's history, and writes of his travels throughout the state. Occasionally Walton hits upon an affecting tale. But in general, his news is so banal that we begin to doubt his sincerity when he writes, for example, ``It became clear to me on reflection that, for the ruling groups, `the War between the States' had been exactly that . . . black Americans were offstage, an unpleasant complication to the real issues.'' The better moments are when Walton invokes other Mississippi authors, such as Richard Wright and William Faulkner; the best chapter is a series of quotes from writers as diverse as V.S. Naipaul and Abraham Lincoln. As for the rest, Walton adds little to our understanding of the pressing tensions between blacks and whites. (12 photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-44600-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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