An intriguing but somewhat uneven exploration of things unseen.
“If you want to understand a place, ignore the boasting monuments and landmarks, and go straight to the haunted houses.”
So begins Dickey’s (Creative Writing/National Univ.; Afterlives of the Saints: Stories from the Ends of Faith, 2012 etc.) exploration into the ghost stories of America and what they reveal about society. On his quest, the author examines every manner of haunted place, from houses like the Seven Gables in Salem, Massachusetts, which inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Gothic romance of the same name, to haunted cities like New Orleans as well as asylums, cemeteries, battlefields, and haunted hotels. While not a new concept, Dickey’s theme has been more extensively explored where fairy tales and general folklore are concerned. In each location, the author reveals not only the ghost stories of the site, but also, most importantly, the site’s true history. This allows us to see how ghost stories often say “more about the tellers than they do about the supernatural.” Throughout history, ghost stories have been used to make money, offer a moral, mark a location, and explain the unexplainable, among many other functions. Interwoven throughout the narrative are the voices of writers and thinkers including Nabokov, Freud, Poe, Dickens, and Stephen King. Most revealing is the author’s examination of the logical factors that contribute to hauntings—e.g., hotels feel eerie because they are uncannily not home, and homes often feel haunted because they have been abandoned. While the histories of the locations are well-expressed, Dickey’s personal experiences can feel flat. The investigation feels especially poignant when he connects the nature of ghost stories to issues like race. Places like Shockoe Bottom in Richmond, where hundreds of black men, women, and children were tortured and buried, should surely offer up their share of ghosts, but most of the spirits have been white. “What does it mean to whitewash the spirits of a city?” Dickey asks. “Does Virginia have ghosts that it is not yet ready to face?”
An intriguing but somewhat uneven exploration of things unseen.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-98019-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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 Yorkerstaff 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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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