Compelling narratives with a personal voice, with some utopian political bite.
A journalist and author drives his truck around the East visiting utopian communities—past and present—and concludes we need to think more like those folks.
Currently a writer-in-residence at the University of Kentucky, Reece (An American Gospel: On Family, History, and the Kingdom of God, 2009, etc.) is, as he acknowledges, a restless soul who loves hopping in his truck and going where his considerable curiosity dictates. After a brief introduction to utopian thinking, the author chronicles his visit to Pleasant Hill, Kentucky, a former Shaker community. In this chapter, we see the pattern that characterizes the others: an intermingling of history with assessments of current status, riffs on why the community eventually failed, and thoughts on what we could learn from the utopians; later, he adds comparisons—e.g., how does community F differ from or resemble communities A-E? Some names serving as touchstones pop up continually: historian Walter Benjamin, poet Wendell Berry. Also popping up are some usage issues: a couple of instances of “revert back” and “sojourn” misused as a synonym for “journey.” Reece is a most gracious guest during visits: respectful, inquisitive, and appreciative of the current community of Acorn (in Virginia), where nudity thrives. The places he profiles include the expected (New Harmony, Indiana; Oneida, New York) and some generally unfamiliar areas: Monk’s Pond, in Kentucky; Utopia, Ohio—precious little remains; Utopia Parkway in Queens, New York). Throughout, Reece provides swift surveys of the lives of various principals: Thoreau at Walden Pond, Josiah Warren on Long Island, and Oneida’s John Humphrey Noyes, who personally delivered the sexual initiation of girls in his community. Later, Noyes fled to Canada, pursued by a statutory rape charge, and Reece ends by following Noyes’ route to Niagara Falls and ruminating about what he sees as our current ruinous economic and social policies.
Compelling narratives with a personal voice, with some utopian political bite.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-374-10657-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
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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