An engagingly written mix of research, reportage, and memoir, infused with the passion of discovery.
A poet and professor comes to terms with her Native American heritage.
Though many tribes have been better able to sustain a collective identity—whether on a reservation or through perpetuation of their legacy—Low (Jackalope, 2015, etc.) never knew much about her Delaware (Lenape) heritage when she was growing up in Kansas. When the Delaware “sold” Manhattan to the Dutch in 1626, many of them dispersed in various directions, sometimes in different clans (“Wolf, Turkey, and Turtle”), but they retained no sustained tribal identity. Low’s mother rarely acknowledged that bloodline and showed disfavor toward the daughter who so resembled her grandfather. “Discrimination against Native people has been so fierce that many people, like my family, suppressed their identity with non-Europeans as completely as possible,” she writes. “Some black Cherokees chose to identify with African Americans because it was easier.” As the former poet laureate of Kansas and a dean at the Haskell Indian Nations University, she found herself traveling around the state, hearing stories from those with similar backgrounds. She became even more curious about the legacy that seemed lost, the history her family never spoke about, the one it had tried to hide, to marry above, to leave dead in the past. “This process has healed me,” she writes, allowing her to deepen the sort of relationship with her mother that they’d never had when the latter was living, to discover just how much in common she had with her grandfather, and to realize how those earlier had suffered at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan and discrimination in general. “The story of my grandfather and my mother has become my own, as my past grows longer than my future,” she writes.
An engagingly written mix of research, reportage, and memoir, infused with the passion of discovery.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8032-9493-6
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Bison/Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
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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