An expertly written study in true crime, vividly recapturing the mood of 1968.
From veteran journalist and historian Sides (Blood and Thunder, 2006, etc.), a riveting account of James Earl Ray’s long quest to kill Martin Luther King Jr.
Prisoner 416-J, late of the state penitentiary in Jefferson City, Mo., spent a large part of the first months of 1967 perfecting a circus-ready form of yoga. With it, as Sides’s vigorous account begins, he folded himself into an impossibly tight space, namely a breadbox, and fled from prison, criss-crossing the country before winding up in Los Angeles and attending bartender school. Somewhere along the way, he fell under the spell of George Wallace, the firebrand Alabama governor who had promised segregation forever, and took it as his earthly task to kill King. According to Sides, Ray’s timing was never quite right until he found a hotel room across from King’s in Memphis, Tenn., and took his fateful shot. He escaped, again following a tortuous course that eventually took him to Portugal and other faraway points. Finally captured and imprisoned, he managed to escape again—one might assume with help, though the author discounts this possibility. Ray was soon recaptured, and he died in prison in 1998. Sides follows Ray in a nearly minute-by-minute account that has all the fascination, if little of the inevitability, of Frederick Forsyth’s Day of the Jackal (1971). The author does not speculate unduly on conspiracy theories of the sort advanced by Ray’s brother, John Larry Ray, in his 2008 book Truth at Last, but there is room for the careful reader to imagine that someone helped him along on his hunt for King—after all, as Sides observes, “he must have had an accomplice—or several accomplices” to have made good his escape from Jefferson City.
An expertly written study in true crime, vividly recapturing the mood of 1968.Pub Date: April 27, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-385-52392-9
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
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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