Impressively authoritative and thoughtfully composed.
A historian reconsiders America’s most notorious prison riot.
In September 1971, after a tense four-day standoff, the Attica Correctional Facility in western New York was finally back under state control, the remaining hostages freed, and officials, particularly those in Gov. Nelson Rockefeller’s office, felt relieved. When it soon came apparent, however, that tales of hostage abuse—castrations, slit throats—were false, that the gunfire could have come only from corrections officers and troopers during the assault, the state began almost immediately to cover up what had happened. Thompson (History/Univ. of Michigan; Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City, 2001, etc.) devotes the first half of her narrative to describing in compelling detail the appalling conditions at the prison, the incident that sparked the uprising, the prisoners’ grievances and demands, and the subsequent, tense negotiations overseen by a hastily formed committee of observers, culminating in the facility’s extraordinarily violent retaking. It’s the book’s second half, however, that offers the real eye-opener for readers whose interest in Attica and knowledge of what happened ended when the headlines receded. Thompson carefully tracks the uprising’s dismal aftermath, a bewildering, decadeslong series of commissions, investigations, lawsuits (civil and criminal), and settlement talks. At almost every juncture, she reveals state officials—prison guards, troopers, prosecutors, judges, politicians—acting in bad faith, either criminally or through gross negligence. Her report, not entirely unjustly, will be attacked as too “pro-prisoner,” but her critics will be obliged to account for her sensitive treatment of the state’s callous handling of the surviving hostages and their families and her not infrequent criticisms of the actors who glommed on to the Attica story for their own political purposes. Moreover, detractors will be forced to match the evidence she musters, 10 years’ worth of research—many files remain sealed to this day—her discovery of records long hidden, her numerous firsthand interviews, and her archival deep-dive. Meanwhile, conditions at Attica remain worse than they were in 1971.
Impressively authoritative and thoughtfully composed.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-375-42322-2
Page Count: 752
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: July 25, 2016
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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