Missing here is the firm hand of an editor that might have shaped a verbose and rather shapeless narrative into a compelling...
A story of racism, injustice, corruption and greed run rampant in 1930s Georgia.
Former Atlanta Journal Constitution editor Beasley (co-author: Inside Coca-Cola: A CEO's Life Story of Building the World's Most Popular Brand, 2011) digs into some shameful events in Georgia’s history, focusing mostly on a judicial system that swiftly arrested, tried, convicted and sent six black men to the electric chair while two white “thrill killers” escaped that fate. The author provides details of the known facts behind their crimes and of the mass execution on the night of Dec. 9, 1938. To add insult to injury, five of the six bodies were not even given burial but were turned over to medical schools as cadavers. The racist bent of all-white Southern juries is a familiar story, but the close ties between the Ku Klux Klan and the state government will perhaps be news. According to Beasley, the Klan infiltrated the state government. E.D. Rivers, governor from 1937 to 1941, had been named a Grand Titan for the state of Georgia by Hiram Wesley Evans, the Klan’s Imperial Wizard. After his inauguration, Rivers gave Evans a monopoly on the state’s asphalt business, a venture that later expanded into other lucrative businesses. Beasley writes that besides handing Evans a “license to print money” at the government’s expense, the corrupt Rivers had his own racket of selling pardons to convicted gangsters, murderers and other criminals. Unfortunately, the author’s account is diffuse and repetitive, losing focus by overly detailing minor characters and wandering off into side issues such as the eugenics movement.
Missing here is the firm hand of an editor that might have shaped a verbose and rather shapeless narrative into a compelling story, for the facts of the matter deserve a better telling.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-01466-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
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
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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