An accessible, entrancing story that draws readers into a family’s many triumphs and travails.
This posthumous release by first-time novelist Norris largely succeeds in ensnaring fans of multigenerational melodramas.
Norris tells the saga, based on a true story, of the Mattisons, a family of hardscrabble, mountain farmers in West Virginia who, out of desperation, develop a small outcrop of coal on their property and become miners. The novel follows the secretive, nefarious way the mining venture got its startup capital—which causes the family’s daughter, Gem, to strike out on her own, becoming the madam of the lone bawdy house in the nearby town of Fairmont, while her brothers join her father in what grows into the world’s largest coal corporation. As the Mattisons flourish and become a mining dynasty, Norris does a marvelous job getting readers emotionally invested in the ever-expanding family, especially those members working to better the hazardous conditions for the miners, despite the deplorable indifference of the coal barons. Like such generational-saga veterans as James Michener and John Jakes, Norris admirably weaves fascinating historical details into her narrative, with her exhaustive research giving context to events within her novel. Following the Mattisons takes readers on a journey through the development of West Virginia’s coal mining industry, which comes to rule the state. Norris, a former West Virginia schoolteacher, started the novel at the age of 72, but failing health caused her to set it aside in the midst of revisions. Her son Randolph rediscovered the work, which had been tucked in a closet for 23 years, and shepherded it through to publication. Norris’ legacy is an engrossing tale of love and heartbreak, wealth and greed. The book would have benefited from more thorough editing, though, to remove repetitiveness and fix typos, but the story’s overall strength overcomes these shortcomings.
An accessible, entrancing story that draws readers into a family’s many triumphs and travails.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-1481772693
Page Count: 260
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
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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