An enthralling work of history told with intelligence and urgency.
Lawton chronicles the plight of Kevin Barry Artt, falsely convicted of murdering a prison official for the Irish Republican Army, in this nonfiction work.
Kevin Barry Artt grew up in Belfast during the 1970s and 1980s, a period during which tensions between the British and those Irish who longed for independence reached their violent heights, a turbulence vividly depicted by the author. Kevin was raised a Catholic, and was accustomed to the social sanctions that religious affiliation brought—he was beaten up for being Catholic as a child, and his father’s business was bombed (“Afterward, no one was charged in the incident. John rebuilt the garage and went back to work”). The young man did his best to avoid confrontation, but that became impossible when he started working as a driver for Ace Taxi in 1976; the Royal Ulster Constabulary assumed all the company’s drivers were IRA-affiliated men and therefore hated them, while Loyalists distrusted them as well. Kevin was harassed incessantly and assassination attempts were made on his life. When Albert Miles, a high-ranking prison official, was murdered by the IRA in 1978, Kevin was arrested for the killing, apparently on the strength of an identification made by an informant. Under extraordinary coercion, he confessed to the crime, and, despite his subsequent retraction of his confession, he was found guilty on 184 criminal counts and sentenced to life in prison. Miraculously, he was pulled into an IRA-orchestrated prison break in 1983 and made his way to San Francisco, only to be apprehended and tried yet again. The author, who served as part of Kevin’s legal team in California, paints a dramatically stunning tableau of his cinematic plight and of the grim tumult in Northern Ireland at the time. The rigor and expansiveness of Lawton’s research is simply astonishing, and his journalistic prose is exacting and powerful. This is by turns a terrifying and heartbreaking story, conveyed with impressive skill and moral clarity.
An enthralling work of history told with intelligence and urgency.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781960332264
Page Count: 506
Publisher: WildBlue Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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