With an occasional lapse into a breast-beating aside, Jackson ably depicts a culture bent on fencing in men as well as...
An exciting, fast-paced account of crime and punishment at the close of the American frontier.
While researching his book Dead Run (1999), an account of prison escapee Dennis Stockton, freelance journalist Jackson happened across the tale of Frank Grigware. Sentenced in 1909 to life imprisonment in Leavenworth, Grigware hijacked a supply train with a group of inmates, and successfully avoided recapture for the next 25 years. Jackson confesses that at first he wasn’t enthusiastic about following Grigware’s trail, not wanting “to devote more years to yet another prison saga.” Fans of true crime will be glad that he did, though, for besides charting Grigware’s curious career and still more curious retirement, Jackson does a fine job of summarizing the West’s none too admirable record in preventing and punishing crime, which was all too common in a country where alcoholism and madness were epidemic. As with Stockton, Jackson tends to explain away Grigware’s alleged crimes, which ranged from petty thievery to train robbery (or, at the very least, hanging out with train robbers, a pastime that western lawmen did their best to discourage). Unlucky and perhaps a little stupid, Grigware got caught, did a little of his time, broke free, and vanished, leaving a dim trail across the Northwest and eventually settling in the mountains of British Columbia, where, having changed his name, he became a solid citizen and good neighbor. When his true identity was discovered years later, Grigware successfully fought extradition in a legal brouhaha that took years and involved Depression-era figures such as J. Edgar Hoover, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and Attorney General Homer Cummings. In his closing pages, Jackson depicts a Grigware old, ill, and a little bewildered by the flood of Americans—this time fleeing the draft—into his adopted country.
With an occasional lapse into a breast-beating aside, Jackson ably depicts a culture bent on fencing in men as well as rangeland.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2001
ISBN: 0-7867-0897-2
Page Count: 432
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
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
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s...
Music journalist and musician Wald (Talking 'Bout Your Mama: The Dozens, Snaps, and the Deep Roots of Rap, 2014, etc.) focuses on one evening in music history to explain the evolution of contemporary music, especially folk, blues, and rock.
The date of that evening is July 25, 1965, at the Newport Folk Festival, where there was an unbelievably unexpected occurrence: singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, already a living legend in his early 20s, overriding the acoustic music that made him famous in favor of electronically based music, causing reactions ranging from adoration to intense resentment among other musicians, DJs, and record buyers. Dylan has told his own stories (those stories vary because that’s Dylan’s character), and plenty of other music journalists have explored the Dylan phenomenon. What sets Wald's book apart is his laser focus on that one date. The detailed recounting of what did and did not occur on stage and in the audience that night contains contradictory evidence sorted skillfully by the author. He offers a wealth of context; in fact, his account of Dylan's stage appearance does not arrive until 250 pages in. The author cites dozens of sources, well-known and otherwise, but the key storylines, other than Dylan, involve acoustic folk music guru Pete Seeger and the rich history of the Newport festival, a history that had created expectations smashed by Dylan. Furthermore, the appearances on the pages by other musicians—e.g., Joan Baez, the Weaver, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Dave Van Ronk, and Gordon Lightfoot—give the book enough of an expansive feel. Wald's personal knowledge seems encyclopedic, and his endnotes show how he ranged far beyond personal knowledge to produce the book.
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s personal feelings about Dylan's music or persona.Pub Date: July 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236668-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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