A well-paced, thorough investigation of a half-century-old crime whose effects are still felt in the Appalachian coal fields.
Cat-and-mouse account of the murder of a union activist battling corruption in the coal fields.
Attorney and former CIA officer Bradley recounts the 1969 murder of Joseph Yablonski, who rose through the ranks of the United Mine Workers of America to become a lieutenant of John L. Lewis, a champion of miners’ rights. Yablonski, writes the author, was “stunned” when Lewis selected an empty suit named Tony Boyle to become his vice president. While Lewis took his union members out on a long strike and denounced coal companies for ignoring worker safety, Boyle was an accommodationist who, after a terrible mine accident, went out of his way to absolve the owner of responsibility and “reminded the families, as if they did not already know it, that coal mining was a very dangerous way to make a living.” Clearly Boyle wasn’t the right man for the job, but when Yablonski mounted a campaign to replace him as union president, Boyle arranged for his murder. When hired killers infiltrated Yablonski’s home, they killed his wife and daughter as well. It took years of courtroom tedium, coordinated by prosecutor Richard Aurel Sprague, to arrive at the facts of the killing. Readers may feel that justice was not fully served when they learn that a couple of the principals, including a manipulative woman who betrayed her own father, were allowed to slip away into the witness protection program. Still, like Sprague, who had a remarkable winning record (“He had sought first-degree murder convictions in sixty-four cases and got what he asked for in sixty-three”), Bradley sets forth a methodical, step-by-step account of the vicious murders and Boyle’s fall from power and life imprisonment. Yablonski loyalists were able to effect some of the reforms he’d argued for, including a more effective pension plan and overall stronger union.
A well-paced, thorough investigation of a half-century-old crime whose effects are still felt in the Appalachian coal fields.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-393-65253-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | BUSINESS | MODERN | UNITED STATES | GENERAL BUSINESS
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
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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