Acclaimed fiction-writer Kingsolver (The Bean Trees, 1987); Homeland and Other Stories, p. 572) worked as a journalist covering the strike against the Phelps Dodge Copper Corporation (June 1983 to about December 1985) that shook the economic and social order in several isolated Arizona towns. Her partisan account focuses on how women—as miners, but more often as members of the Women's Auxiliary—emerged to play a major role both in the conflict and in grass-roots labor organization. There's much interesting material here about the past role of women and MexicanAmericans in the labor movement, some shockers about union-busting, and thoughtprovoking material about the strike's uneasy conclusion: workers losing their jobs, mining operations closing, the increasingly radicalized women who eventually defied not just the company but the male leadership of the union emerging with a personal sense of empowerment. But the book is not as successful in one of its stated goals: presenting the human drama, Kingsolver relies heavily on interviews; the quotes go on too long; the women often tell similar stories and their personalities rarely emerge. A better read would be Kingsolver's own short story "Why I Am a Danger to the Public" (from Homeland), which needs fewer than 20 pages to present a vivid fictionalized version, including violent hostility between striking and scab families; the arrival of heavily armed State Police; evictions from company housing, etc. Provocative but limited: the makings of a few excellent magazine articles fall short as a book.
Pub Date: Nov. 15, 1989
ISBN: 0801483891
Page Count: 252
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1989
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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