An enlightening account of the burdens facing both the abused and the people coming to their aid.
A counselor recounts her time running a Texas children’s home, focusing on one case involving three Russian children.
After earning a master’s degree in counseling, debut author Black took a job at a center for abused children. Seeing firsthand the dilapidated state of the facility, she decided to open her own home. The Roosevelt House, finally realized in 2008, was a chance to help numerous children in need of care. But the author’s life took an unexpected turn, starting with a simple request from Child Protective Services to perform a psychosocial evaluation on a father and his adopted children in a nearby town. At the time, there were abuse claims against the man’s wife. But the oldest of the three kids, 12-year-old Alexey, who asserted the woman regularly abused him, was contradicted by the husband and the boy’s younger sisters, Anastasia and Svetlana. The father was initially happy for Alexey, a habitual runaway, to stay at the Roosevelt House but changed his mind after believing he would have to pay child support. So began a relentless struggle by the author to get Alexey, and later the girls, out of the couple’s house—especially demanding, as CPS concluded no abuse had been taking place. Black’s straightforward prose is effective, clearly presenting her perspective: She firmly believed the parents were abusive but received no assistance from CPS or even law enforcement. Still, some of the literal imagery doubles as potent metaphors. For example, the author spotted a barbed-wire fence before checking on the three children, who had just run away from home, and dubbed the father, with a trash bag of Alexey’s belongings over his shoulder, a “bizarre Santa.” The abuse, as described by the kids, is disturbing. But the illuminating story is frequently uplifting, as neither Black nor Alexey surrenders, and occasionally comical: The boy believed that stonewashed, holey jeans at a clothing store were definitely used.
An enlightening account of the burdens facing both the abused and the people coming to their aid.Pub Date: March 4, 2024
ISBN: 9798988707905
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Black Flower Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2018
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 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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