An exhaustive, courageous examination of racism’s horrifying but sometimes very familiar face.
An infamous photograph of a 1930 lynching in Marion, Ind., sends the author on a decade-long search for its story and for the role her grandfather might have played.
Former Village Voice arts writer Carr did not see the photograph—or know her grandfather had been a KKK member—until she was an adult. This latter discovery fueled her research and animates this remarkable work from first page to last. She began by establishing a relationship with James Cameron, a black man who’d been miraculously spared what was to have been a triple lynching (mob retribution for a white man’s murder and his girlfriend’s putative rape). When the author began her vast, at times dangerous, research, the elderly Cameron was trying to establish a lynching museum in Milwaukee. Before it was all over (though, as she notes, there is no end), Carr had learned the history of Marion and Grant County; she had done extensive interviews with Indiana KKK leaders—and attended their rallies and listened to endless hours of their bile and bull (some of this material veers near redundancy); she had spoken with those who had witnessed the lynching, those who had seen the two bodies hanging, those who were relatives of victims and lynchers alike. She read local newspapers on countless spools of microfilm, observed the election of Grant County’s first black sheriff, visited and re-visited all relevant sites, investigated her own family history, which includes the possibility of a distant Native American ancestor. She discovers many things on her journey: She learns firsthand of the fallibility of memory, of the enduring power of rumor and legend, of the depth of the current of racism that courses through today’s America. And, most powerfully, she considers the question of the guilt one feels for deeds done—and not done—by beloved relatives. The revelation on her final page is devastating.
An exhaustive, courageous examination of racism’s horrifying but sometimes very familiar face.Pub Date: March 21, 2006
ISBN: 0-517-70506-0
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2006
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 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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