A Faulknerian inquiry that circles back on itself as it reveals the heart of Dixie’s attempt to shed the instilled behavior...
The story behind a searing image of the civil-rights era, from an author notable for his thoughtful considerations of recent history (The Living and the Dead, 1996, etc.).
The landmark Life photograph shows Billy Ferrell, a white Mississippi sheriff, gleefully swinging a billy club, surrounded by six colleagues, all ready to block James Meredith’s attempt to integrate the University of Mississippi in September 1962. Hendrickson (Nonfiction Writing/Univ. of Pennsylvania) tracked down two survivors of this group, as well as children and grandchildren, hoping to discover: “How did a gene of intolerance and racial fear mutate as it passed sinuously through time and family bloodstreams?” Through interviews and extensive research in private and government collections, he learned that one of the deceased sheriffs may have raped female prisoners and abetted murder. Yet succeeding generations could adapt in unexpected ways. Ferrell’s son Tom, for instance, with his father’s swagger and his own p.r. skills, became president of the National Sheriffs Association; grandson Ty serves as a US border patrol agent in New Mexico, uneasy about corralling illegal aliens. John Cothran, grandson of the morally ambivalent figure in the photograph with his back to the camera, is a store manager with warring impulses toward generosity and uncontrollable anger. Meredith’s son John is now an archconservative congressional lobbyist, while Joe overcame lupus and shyness to gain a doctoral degree at Ole Miss 40 years after his father’s admission. Hendrickson, a former feature writer for the Washington Post, crafts a narrative like the Mississippi River: it rolls along quietly, even lazily for long stretches, only to gather enormous power when least expected. He finds in this beautiful but haunted land “all the shadows of the overhanging Confederate past, along with the new shoots so susceptible to quick loss, trampling.”
A Faulknerian inquiry that circles back on itself as it reveals the heart of Dixie’s attempt to shed the instilled behavior of American apartheid as well as its legal code.Pub Date: March 24, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-40461-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
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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