Chicago radio legend and oral historian Terkel (Race, 1992, etc.), himself an active octogenarian, leads a chorus of 68 senior citizens who vow not to go gentle into that good night. The leitmotif of this work is sounded in the inaugural interview by environmentalist David Brower, founder of the Friends of the Earth: "The older you are, the freer you are, as long as you last." The accent, as in Terkers Working (1974), is on careers rather than personal lives. For his subjects, who range in age from 70 to 99, Terkel, an unreconstructed liberal, chose mostly kindred rebel spirits: e.g., John Kenneth Galbraith, Congressman Henry Gonzalez (D-Tex.), labor leader Victor Reuther, self-proclaimed "secular humanist" columnist Betty McCollister, and pioneering gay liberationist Harry Hay. Only one respondent, an 82-year-old stockbroker, counters his implicit portrait of risk-taking seniors when she notes of their investment proclivities, "Older people are . . . less interested in taking chances." These men and women are eyewitnesses to the social tumult of this century: civil-rights struggles, environmental catastrophe, war, poverty, the corporate jungle, sexual revolution, and McCarthyism. Many focus on youthful struggles, like Genora Johnson Dollinger, who recalls how, as a fiery 23-year-old, she mounted a union sound truck during the 1937 Flint sit-down strike against GM. Others discuss continuing the good fight even to this day, such as Millie Beck, who takes on doctors and HMOs for their shoddy treatment of the elderly, and Joe Begley, a 75-year-old Kentucky storekeeper and strip-mining opponent who pledges, "The last flicker of my life will be against something that I don't think ought to be." Common concerns here include the role of technology in modern society, the historical amnesia and scary future of the young, ethnic and class divisions that many attribute to the Reagan-Bush administrations, and, inevitably, the toll that age has taken on their health. These interviews pay stirring tribute to "living repositories of our past, our history.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-56584-284-7
Page Count: 496
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
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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