A well-researched and highly readable historical account.
A historical account of a blacksmith who tests the limits of America’s justice system.
In 1798 Philadelphia, Patrick Lyon is a hardworking, honest blacksmith. He’s a Scottish immigrant who fairly recently became a citizen of the United States and leagues away from the monied class that controls the fledgling republic’s government. Summers are a dangerous time in Philadelphia, as yellow fever rages, and those who can afford it leave for the countryside. Lyon can’t, so through most of the summer he keeps his shop open and does work for a number of customers, including the Bank of Pennsylvania. But when disease becomes too much to bear, he leaves for Delaware. While he’s gone, the Bank of Pennsylvania is robbed; Lyon is charged with the robbery without probable cause and held in jail for months. Authors Lankenau and Lankenau prove to have done their research; in an authors’ note, they establish that this book isn’t simply about one man’s abuse at the hands of an early United States justice system—it is “a rare and extraordinary glimpse into early patrician America.” It’s the story of an immigrant who “discovers the truths written in the Declaration of Independence to be anything but self-evident” and a book that weighs in on issues of its day without doing so in a didactic manner. A good portion of the narrative relies on dialogue, and the authors make it clear that it’s pulled from real exchanges gathered via trial transcripts, journals, and other primary sources; a comprehensive list of notes can be found at the end of the book. Sections in italics are direct quotations—exactly how the speakers said or wrote them more than 200 years ago. Because the authors are so transparent about their process, readers will trust in the narrative’s accuracy even when the structure seems clunky; the book relies on relatively short sections and chapters that make for easy reading but aren’t necessarily ideal for cohesive, sustained storytelling.
A well-researched and highly readable historical account.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-942586-82-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little Creek Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2020
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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