Okeowo delivers a portrait of a past-haunted place that is at once empathetic, sad, and troubling.
A native daughter returns to Alabama, a state much misunderstood—and for plentiful reasons.
New Yorker staff writer Okeowo was born in Houston and lived there for her first six years, but her parents, Nigerian immigrants, felt more at home in Alabama. So does she: “Montgomery is the only place I consider my hometown, the place where the bare bones of my self grew and fused together and gently solidified.” Having reported for years in Africa, she finds Alabama a place similarly both “stereotyped and neglected.” There’s cause for that stereotyping, for Alabama harbors sharply antagonistic racial divides—as she wryly notes, every time her aspirational parents moved into a white neighborhood, the whites moved elsewhere, only to find that “Black people followed them there, too.” The divides are real and persistent. One of Okeowo’s chief interlocutors is a descendant of secessionists who “has an unrelenting pride in his story…the kind of pride that still revered the indecency of his elders.” Even so, he tries to connect with her and she with him, “because that’s what you do down here.” Such connections are not always easy to make: By Okeowo’s account, many of Alabama’s Native Americans, few but politically astute and relatively affluent, seem as wary of their Black neighbors as of their white ones, while the white mayor of Montgomery permitted the erection of historical markers relating to slavery only because he reckoned that they would draw tourist dollars. Okeowo ventures theses that Alabamians and others will find fascinating and provocative, among them the thought that the Lost Cause myth was in good part crafted by “certain white women” and that much of the ugliness of Alabama’s past—“Indian removal, the slave trade, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow”—is absent by design from official histories and “public stories.”
Okeowo delivers a portrait of a past-haunted place that is at once empathetic, sad, and troubling.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2025
ISBN: 9781250206220
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
