A lively model of modern folklore and a must for fans of the original series.
A welcome rekindling of the Foxfire franchise of books on Southern folkways.
Journalist Hudgins and former Foxfire student Phillips continue the fine tradition of publishing collections of oral history around Southern Appalachian cultural mores begun by teacher Eliot Wigginton in the early 1970s. There are modern wrinkles: Whereas an old-timer in the first edition would have described a ginseng-gathering folk economy with few practitioners and consumers, today the old-timers—i.e., men and women mostly born in the 1950s—recount an industry fueling a large Chinese market, so that, says Georgia master Tommy Hayes, “Some people go through the mountains like a vacuum cleaner,” adding, “but what are you going to do the next year?” In keeping with Foxfire tradition, there’s a little bit of everything in this collection: There are stories about outrunning the revenuers and the well-documented subsequent birth of stock car racing and thence NASCAR, of a “quasi-hippie” Kentucky police officer who once pulled “Elvis duty” to guard Presley on a run to an ophthalmologist’s appointment: “He wanted to buy my revolver, but I didn’t sell it to him.” More to the point, that police officer has since become a man of parts befitting the Appalachians: He makes banjos, knives, rifles, and sculptures, talks philosophy and archaeology, and generally enjoys the self-sufficient life for which the high country is known. Hudgins and Phillips also profile a cook who won the James Beard Award for collecting recipes for smoked ham, buttermilk cornbread, and the like (with a few recipes included here for good measure); a native-daughter historian of the African-American presence in the Southern Appalachians; a game warden, a turkey hunter, a cave explorer, the list goes on. A bonus is a lightly learned but revealing history of the classic mountain song “Man of Constant Sorrow,” itself revived with the 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou?
A lively model of modern folklore and a must for fans of the original series.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-43629-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
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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