Provocative and disturbing.
A journalist’s gripping account of a modern fundamentalist Christian pioneer family and the dark secrets that held it together.
Robert “Papa Pilgrim” Hale, his wife and 15 children came to the remote little town of McCarthy, Alaska, convinced that it was God’s will they settle there. Claiming that he and his family wanted nothing more than “to live our old-time way and be left in peace,” Pilgrim bought privately owned acreage that happened to be surrounded by lands managed by the National Park Service. McCarthy residents fell in love with the idealistic, God-fearing family members and marveled at how they “could light up any space” with their idiosyncratic brand of American roots music. But when Papa Pilgrim decided to clear a road that ran on public land to the property he christened Hillbilly Heaven, residents became enmeshed in a bitter battle that ensued between their neighbors and the Park Service. On assignment from his newspaper, Kizzia (The Wake of the Unseen Object: Travels Through Alaska’s Native Landscapes, 1998) successfully solicited the media-wary Pilgrim for an interview. What he learned—that Pilgrim was the son of a rich Texas family with links to the FBI—was only a small part of the whole story, which came out only after Pilgrim’s eldest children ran away from home. The real Papa Pilgrim was a deluded megalomaniac who physically and emotionally brutalized his wife and children. He was also a sexual deviant who coerced his eldest daughter, Elishaba, “to keep his flesh working” so that he could bring forth the 21 children he believed God wanted him to have with Elishaba’s mother. The horror at the heart of this story about religious extremism on the fringes of the last American frontier is slow to reveal itself, but when that horror fully emerges, it will swallow most readers.
Provocative and disturbing.Pub Date: July 16, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-307-58782-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
PROFILES
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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