Mixing fascinating investigation and macabre memoir, this is a dark ride with substance.
The apparent suicide of a stranger becomes both the subject of an author’s true-crime investigation and the catalyst for her intimate memoir.
Brottman (Humanities/Maryland Institute Coll. of Art; The Maximum Security Book Club: Reading Literature in a Men’s Prison, 2016, etc.) opens this compelling, often creepy book with a “Missing” poster she spotted on her morning walk, asking for information about a strikingly handsome young man named Rey Rivera. His image stuck with her, and when his decomposing body was found in an unoccupied office in the building where Brottman lives, an obsession was born. That building is the Belvedere Hotel, a Baltimore landmark built in 1903. Rivera went off the top of the 13-story building and plunged through the roof of a smaller building. By all accounts, Rivera was a happy newlywed with a thriving business, a former Olympic-caliber water polo player who charmed everyone; in short, he was an unlikely candidate for suicide. Brottman, a scholar and psychoanalyst who often writes about true crime, spent a decade trying to understand his death, meeting mysteries at nearly every turn. Why did the Baltimore police seemingly conduct only a cursory investigation? Did Rivera’s death have anything to do with his former employment with Agora, a multimillion-dollar financial advising firm entangled with legal problems and conspiracy theories? Woven into Rivera’s story is the author’s own: her striking sense of being invisible to other people and her fascination with death (she catalogs historical suicides at the Belvedere). She writes of a police description of another suicide, “I felt I had found exactly what I am looking for—a crack in the surface of things that shows me the world is not the place I have assumed it to be….I am not a gawker: I am a connoisseur.”
Mixing fascinating investigation and macabre memoir, this is a dark ride with substance.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-16914-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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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