An interesting detour into a true-crime niche.
Strand (Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power, and Lies, 2008, etc.) explores the connection between America’s sprawling highway system and the pathology of the murderers who have made them a killing ground.
Alternating case histories of notorious serial killers who exploited the mobility and anonymity made possible by the interstates with a history of the political and social forces that built them, the author strives to debunk popular notions of the resourceful, brilliant psychopath—most of the men profiled here were uncharismatic, not particularly bright and eerily ordinary in affect and appearance. She also tries to link the psychological effects of the lonely open road to the will to murder. Strand’s sociological assertions can seem a bit notional and flimsily argued, and the history of the politics behind the building of the interstates is unsurprisingly dry, but the case histories of the murderers and their crimes exert a queasy fascination. The author offers well-researched summations of the Charles Starkweather/Caril Fugate multi-state spree, the appalling history of the Atlanta child murders and the prostitute killings of trucker Bruce Mendenhall, among others. The chilling effect of these stories is difficult to shake. The Mendenhall material is particularly interesting in its look at truck-stop design and the trucking lifestyle and the ways in which they may actually precipitate violent behavior. The narrative is tedious for stretches, not unlike a long cross-country drive, but the grim stories of murder on the highway may do for road trips what Jaws did for surfing.
An interesting detour into a true-crime niche.Pub Date: April 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-292-72637-6
Page Count: 222
Publisher: Univ. of Texas
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
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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