A dangerous work, capable of provoking readers into buying a frog farm.
Polished essays edged with a tinder-dry wit on eight subcultures, some more or less suspect, of the American South, from Discover editor Bilger.
That a number of these subcultures even exist will be a surprise to many people: grabbing catfish out of hidey-holes, supping on squirrel brains, treeing raccoons in the night. But Bilger not only invests these activities with dignity; he makes sensible their place in the folkways of the South, how they evolved and why. Which in no way means these pastimes won't strike readers as crazy or absurd or dangerous. Take noodling for catfish, in which the participant shoves an arm into an underwater chamber, sight unseen, where, hopefully, an alert and aggressive catfish is guarding eggs. The idea is to insert your arm into the fish's mouth and pull it out of its den. Meanwhile, the fish is working on your arm like a rotary sander, that is if you haven't mistakenly introduced your arm into the hideaway of a snapping turtle or cottonmouth. Bilger's technique is to glom himself onto an expert of a tradition—a special game of marbles, farming frogs, cockfighting, white lightning—and follow attentively, all ears but also a hapless ("I learned about the American wilderness by reading James Fenimore Cooper in German") if willing participant in rural arcana that can bite, literally. Like those catfish, or contracting Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease from a simple dish of rodent: "He was putting some squirrel heads in the microwave for lunch, he remembers, when one of the guys mentioned the mad cow disease." Bilger gives each of his subjects solid background, takes pains to get to know his Virgils, and finely paints the landscapes, from the huddled hills of Dark Corners, South Carolina, moonshiners to the redbone coonhound precincts of Oklahoma's Kiamichi Mountains.
A dangerous work, capable of provoking readers into buying a frog farm.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-85010-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
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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