Reconstructed first-person dramatic monologues by 13 characters in the first act of our nation's greatest tragedy. Novice playwrights learn that conflict makes for good theater but exposition doesn't. When the information that must be conveyed is as complicated as the Dred Scott decision or the Kansas-Nebraska act, it takes a consummate dramatist to hide the mechanics that make the stage magic work. Oates is an accomplished biograher and historian (A Woman of Valor: Clara Barton and the Civil War, 1994, etc.) but a neophyte at stage business. Poor Jefferson Davis and Stephen A. Douglas especially end up having to fill in so much information that they sometimes sound more like readers of footnotes than on-stage characters. However, Oates is also obviously a quick learner. He acknowledges his debt to Hal Holbrook's performance in the dramatic monologue Mark Twain Tonight and Julie Harris's portrait of Emily Dickinson in The Belle of Amherst, noting that they proved that real-life characters can be a theatrical match for those drawn from a playwright's imagination. Oates has some wonderfully colorful, eloquent, and dramatic characters to work with, plus 40 years of action in which dramatic tension builds inexorably toward the monumental climax of the Civil War. There are moments of great theater in these interweavings of actual writings with imagined ruminations, in the doomed messianism of the abolitionist John Brown and the slave rebel Nat Turner, in the violent upheaval foretold by the great orator Henry Clay, and especially in the dueling monologues of Davis, Douglas, and Lincoln. If Oates's approach to history seems a frivolous tour de force at the beginning, by the end it seems the best possible device to prove his point: that the North and South eventually saw the world so differently that they stopped talking the same language. One eagerly awaits the promised sequel about the war years.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-06-016784-X
Page Count: 528
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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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