Full of schadenfreude and speculation—and solid, timely history too.
An “epitaph,” as Texas expat and Vanity Fair special correspondent Burrough (Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 2004, etc.) calls it, for a storied, moneyed time that defines the Lone Star State’s self-image.
No matter how the fortune was made, the pattern is the same: The first hardscrabble generation fights, thieves and kills to get rich; the second becomes respectable, makes lots more money and gives money away; the third generation drinks, snorts and whores its way to the poorhouse. Thus, with some tailoring, the course of Burrough’s “big rich” families: the Hunts, Richardsons, Cullens and Murchisons, who came out of the West Texas dust or the South Texas swamps to make astounding fortunes, turn Dallas into a prairie paradise and build mansions that you could lose a herd of cows in. The first generation, writes Burrough, was “the original Beverly Hillbillies, counting their millions around the cement pond as they ogled themselves on the corner of Time.” But they were no simpletons. H.L. Hunt made much of his money not in oil but in real estate. “He was a strange man,” writes Burrough, “a loner who lived deep inside his own peculiar mind,” and who was convinced that he had superhuman qualities. He also had a deep, almost innate understanding of how markets and politics work, and he wielded tremendous power after earning a fortune in a time of severe economic depression precisely because other oil operators did not spend money exploring. Hunt did, living a few secret lives on the side, only to see his fortune dwindle in the hands of his heirs and eventually collapse in the oil-eating recession of 1979. Others of Burrough’s “big four” (including the Bass family, tied in with the Richardsons, last heard from funding research into space colonies) arced along similar rise-and-decline-and-fall paths—but not, as he writes, before they helped install the likes of George W. Bush, Tom DeLay, Phil Gramm and other oil-friendly politicos into office.
Full of schadenfreude and speculation—and solid, timely history too.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59420-199-8
Page Count: 458
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2008
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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