A thoughtful, elegantly written contribution to American studies.
A wide-ranging travelogue in the service of American history.
For some, John Brown (1800-1859), the armed and incendiary abolitionist, was a hero. For others, he was a murderer, certainly an insurrectionary. Dyer was fascinated when she learned that he once lived in her small Ohio town—and possibly spent time in her own house—and she borrows biographer Richard Holmes’ “footsteps principle” to follow her subject of inquiry from place to place. “Returning to the physical places a person once occupied always seems such a private and mysterious act,” she writes, “a way of finding something out that reading alone can’t supply.” Though her reading of Brown’s history is extensive, the book benefits from the author’s hands-on approach to the principal places of his life and death, including apex moments such as Brown’s massacre of pro-slavery settlers in Kansas and his capture (by a rising young officer named Robert E. Lee) at the federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, from which he intended to spark an uprising of enslaved Black people. Along the way, Dyer explodes a few myths and realigns others: For one thing, the Underground Railroad seldom involved the cellars and tunnels of legend, and its stations were inhabited more by freed Black people than by well-meaning Whites. On that score, the author takes a hard look at her hometown to find that only about a third of its pre–Civil War inhabitants were ardent abolitionists, about as many as those who believed the South should remain a slave-based economy. These two observations coincide: “Compared with the number of abolitionists who lived in Hudson,” she writes, “there really were few residents known to have engaged in Railroad activity.” Even the remembrance of Brown, largely forgotten in textbooks, was largely the project of Black people decades after his hanging. Dyer ranks alongside the late Tony Horwitz in her explorations of the past.
A thoughtful, elegantly written contribution to American studies.Pub Date: May 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-629221-36-6
Page Count: 515
Publisher: Univ. of Akron
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
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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