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THE GRAVES ARE WALKING

THE GREAT FAMINE AND THE SAGA OF THE IRISH PEOPLE

Roundly researched work with many poignant stories of misery and loss.

A fresh, fair look at the causes of the devastating Irish potato famine.

While there already exists solid coverage of this tragic episode in history—from Thomas Keneally and Colm Tóibín, among others—Kelly (The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time, 2005, etc.) provides a comprehensive exploration of the crisis in terms of the Irish demographic and geographical makeup, economic infrastructure, tenant-farming patterns, landowner manipulation and wrongheaded British relief policy. The appearance of the mysterious potato blight in 1845, accompanied by the smell of rot, devastated the year’s harvest. The old Protestant Irish landholding system was gradually breaking up into smaller groups of tenant farmers, and then into numerous landless laborers (70 percent of the population of rural Ireland in 1841), such as the cottier and the spalpeen, many of whom still celebrated a “Hidden Ireland” of Catholic faith, Celtic culture and a Bedouin-like meanness that appalled British visitors. The collapse of the Irish manufacturing sector in the 1820s had thrust people onto the already overworked land; families were large, and the potato was the most cost-efficient, high-nutrition crop. As news from Ireland worsened, the British government was thrown into disarray, precipitating debate on the hated Corn Laws. Yet relief did not reach the people who needed it; Irish grain was still being exported to British dining tables, and predatory landowners moved to evict impoverished tenant families. Kelly gives a thorough tracking of Irish emigration as well, which helped account for the shrinkage of the Irish population, by more than 2 million people, during the crisis.

Roundly researched work with many poignant stories of misery and loss.

Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-8050-9184-7

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: May 16, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Awards & Accolades

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  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2017


  • New York Times Bestseller


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  • National Book Award Finalist

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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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