An intriguing story diminished by the inability of the authors to screen out irrelevant or marginal details, making the saga...
A convoluted account of an infamous child kidnapping from 100 years ago, with a contemporary twist.
In August 1912, 4-year-old Bobby Dunbar disappeared during a family gathering near Opelousas, La. His well-to-do parents, Percy and Lessie Dunbar, worked with the police in Louisiana, Mississippi and other states in an effort to recover the child. About eight months later, police arrested an itinerant laborer, William Walters, who was traveling with a boy who appeared to be Bobby. The case became complicated, however, when Julia Anderson, an impoverished single mother, responded to the publicity surrounding the arrest by claiming the boy as her child—though Anderson’s son was named Bruce. Furthermore, Anderson said Walters was caring for Bruce temporarily, with permission. Journalists pounced on the saga, printing accounts that conflicted in almost every detail, and politicians and lawyers also got involved. Some of the Dunbar clan were sure that the boy found with Walters was Bobby. Others who knew the Dunbars felt less certain, believing that Percy and Lessie were claiming parentage of the wrong boy because of emotional imbalance. Because Anderson could muster far fewer resources during the proceedings than were available to the Dunbars, she operated from a disadvantage. Furthermore, many journalists and lookers-on portrayed Anderson as a woman of questionable virtue. Months of conflicting information finally played out in a Louisiana trial, with the jurors finding Walters guilty. Bobby grew up as the Dunbars’ son, and Bobby's descendants were taught to disbelieve anything said by Anderson and her kin. Cutright, Bobby’s granddaughter, collaborating with journalist McThenia, has sought the truth with modern DNA testing, which showed that Anderson was telling the truth.
An intriguing story diminished by the inability of the authors to screen out irrelevant or marginal details, making the saga difficult to follow.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4391-5859-3
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012
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 Yorkerstaff 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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