A vast, voyeuristic view of the epistolary record of America’s last ten decades. Journalist and novelist Grunwald (New Year’s Eve, 1997, etc.) and editor and author Adler (The Jury, 1994) have selected 423 letters reflecting the century’s major events and issues and arranged by decade. The first chapter’s correspondents include Carnegie, Twain, Susan B. Anthony, and Teddy Roosevelt, while the latest letter-writers include George H. Bush, Magic Johnson, David Koresh, and O.J. Simpson. As happens too often here, the notes before each letter are more informative than the missive. Orville Wright’s 1903 telegram never gets off the ground. Similarly, the memo to J. Edgar Hoover after the Hindenberg disaster and Einstein’s 1939 letter warning about the danger of atomic power are, despite their historicity, a boring bust. The editors want to maintain the integrity of these letters, so they don—t delete irrelevancies or correct misspellings. While the inarticulateness of William Carlos Williams, Charlie Chaplin, and Dr. Kevorkian is disappointing, the hands-off editorial strategy works best in the letters of unknowns. Memorable and historic letters are written by an unemployed old man to FDR, an officer reporting the shooting of John Dillinger, and a white supremacist defending a lynching with indignation. Some celebrities do compose letters with conviction, emotion, or comedy, like Vanzetti to Sacco’s son, F. Scott Fitzgerald to Zelda, and Tom Wolfe to New York magazine. Including telegrams, memos, and e-mails allows us to hear the desire in JFK’s 1961 note to Lyndon Johnson: “Do we have a chance of beating the Soviets? Is there any other space program which promises dramatic results in which we could win?” Individually, the letters vary wildly in interest, but as a collection it forms an indispensably off-hand and over-the-shoulder glimpse of our late, great century. (photos and illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 19, 1999
ISBN: 0-385-31590-2
Page Count: 760
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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