This well-paced narrative absorbingly depicts a handful of lives in Indiana in a pivotal year.
A New Yorker faces challenges at a Midwestern college as the turmoil of the 1960s erupts in this debut memoir.
Vahl arrived at Indiana University in the autumn of 1963 without a family escort or any sense of what the future held. An adventurous young white student from a Jewish background, she settled on Indiana because she’d met a few Midwesterners and thought she liked them. In Bloomington, though, the author was stunned to discover not only pointed anti-Semitism, but sexism, creationism, and virulent racism as well. Nearly as soon as she arrived, her black roommate, Katherine Gates, explained that prior to this semester, the black students had been segregated from the others, forced to live in Quonset huts. As Vahl learned quickly thereafter, segments of the school’s student body were no less viciously racist than the administration: A black basketball player who dated her new white friend Shennandoah Waters was castrated and killed—and left in a ditch—the previous year. In the coming months, the author experienced not merely the usual stuff of college life (boys, bands, bad cafeteria food), but also Bibles “raised aloft like banners” at a lecture on evolution and, to compound the shock of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the reaction of her classmates. They threw a victory party, exclaiming: “It’s not just incredible—it’s the best day of our lives!” Vahl was horrified by many events in southern Indiana, but she enjoyed the sweet moments when she found them: dates with a sexy folk musician; the awakening of her love for making art; and delightful card games with her many black friends. The author has a good ear for dialogue and a nice sense of pacing. After a surprisingly slow start, this thoughtful chronicle of a single school year picks up momentum and rolls smoothly through the seasons. Though metaphors occasionally mix with abandon in these pages (“Here I was, cast up like so much human flotsam on the distant shores of this dim Gothic vault of a room, where unfamiliar accents echoed like sirens’ songs in my ears”), Vahl writes clearly and engagingly. Readers interested in Midwestern history, American race relations, and stories of culture shock will find the book both stimulating and convincing.
This well-paced narrative absorbingly depicts a handful of lives in Indiana in a pivotal year.Pub Date: July 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63152-365-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2018
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 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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