Friday, June 29, 2018

Killers of the Flower Moon

In a way, I'm glad that I wasn't able to write my book review when I first sat down to do so. I had very mixed feelings about Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Gramm. I wondered if once I discussed the book at Books & Beer Club if I'd feel any differently about it.

The answer is - no, I don't!

No one in the book club disliked the book. Only two gave the book thumbs up. The rest of us gave it a sideways thumb and most of us for the same reasons.

All of us were fascinated by the story of the Osage murders. How had we never heard of this before? The Osage Indians, like many other Native American tribes, have a storied past. In the late 1800s, they were relocated from Kansas to what is present-day Oklahoma. In the early 1900s, oil was discovered under their land. Most tribe members became wealthy and received leasing fees generated by the drilling of oil on their land. The history is more involved than that, but for the purpose of reviewing the book, that's enough.

The Osage weren't merely rich. They were really rich. A white husband of an Osage wife was asked what he did for a living. He replied that he didn't have to work, he had an Indian wife. They lived lavish lifestyles, had impressive homes. The biggest blot on this wealth was the fact that the majority of Osage had guardians handling all financial aspects of their lives. You can start to imagine the problems that might stem from that.

In the 1920s, many Osage members were being mysteriously murdered. Local officials weren't doing much to solve these murder mysteries and the Bureau of Investigation, in the days prior to it becoming the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was put on the case of those murders that were considered to have taken place on Federal land.

Some of what was expressed in the book was timely. I was able to make lots of connections between the text and things going on in the world today.

As is often the case, I'm going to share with you some of my random observations.

  • For years after the American Revolution, the public opposed the creation of police departments, fearing that they would become forces of repression.
Police departments weren't really in existence until the mid-1800s when the dread of the so-called dangerous classes surpassed dread of the state.
  • The land grabs of settlers in the late 1800s was really a land grab. A time was set, a shotgun went off and whomever got there first got to claim the land. When I taught about this aspect of the settling of Oregon, I envisioned it as a peaceful process. A wagon train would approach unsettled land. Pioneers would calmly divvy up the land and start building their homes and their fences, often with the cooperation and assistance of other pioneers. The description of the race for (previously) Indian land was so violent. People shooting each other, knocking each other down. Fainting, trampling, deaths. Here and there men were fighting to the death over claims which each maintained he was first to reach. Not what I envisioned at all!
  • I'd also never given much thought to the evolution of detectives and investigators. During much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, private detective agencies had filled the vacuum left by decentralized, underfunded, incompetent, and corrupt sheriff and police departments.
  • It was slow going linking the murders together since most of the murders were carried out in very different ways. There was no signature. The story was focused on Molly Burkhart and the murders of her family members. Two of Molly's sisters had been murdered. Her mother, Lizzie, was diabetic, and under their noses, doctors were giving Lizzie poison rather than insulin.
  • I hate slurs against Jews. In this case, the slur was by one of the "bad guys" involved in the murders. A man filled with venom and bigotry, he'd once complained that Hale and Ernest Burkhart were "too much Jew - they want everything for nothing. No, they weren't Jewish. Ernest was Mollie's husband and Hale was his uncle. They were bad to the bone.
  •  I thought the book would be more about the formation of the FBI than it was. In fact, more of the focus was on J. Edgar Hoover than the FBI. In the early days, there were no real forensics. Crime scene evidence wasn't preserved, finger prints and DNA weren't yet sciences. Which made me think of my recent jury duty experience. Lots of deputies were called to the stand and each one had to give a full accounting of all his or her forensic training. It's amazing what can be done now that couldn't be done then.
  • And speaking of juries... There was one question that the judge and the prosecutors and the defense never asked the jurors but that was central to the proceedings: Would a jury of twelve white men ever punish another white man for killing an American Indian? One skeptical reported noted, "The attitude of a pioneer cattleman toward the full-blood Indian...is fairly well recognized." A prominent member of the Osage tribe put the matter more bluntly: "It is a question in my mind whether this jury is considering a murder case or not. The question for them to decide is whether a white man killnig an Osage is murder - or merely cruelty to animals."
  • At book club, we agreed that it was probably good that we didn't know anything about the Osage murders before reading the book. This way we were able to read this as a murder mystery, trying to figure out "whodunnit" and why. 
  • I chuckled over this passage regarding Tom White, the primary investigator from the FBI.  White's body was beginning to fail him. He had arthritis. He tripped walking (walking!) and injured himself.
  • I didn't find Killers of the Flower Moon particularly well-written. While the story was definitely interesting and held my attention, Grann's writing often bogged me down. White assisted on the writing the history of the Osage murders. That book was never published because the story wasn't found to be captivating enough. Fred Groves, White's co-writer, eventually wrote a fictionalized version of the story called The Years of Fear. That sounded like it might be more readable, but the one review I found of that story said that it was actually less readable!
  •  Grann stumbled across a reference to the murders and that got his interest going. This was not something that he'd read about in any history book. He did lots of research, met with lots of Osage Nation members. 
  • And as I dug deeper into the Osage murder cases - into the murk of autopsies and witness testimony and probate records - I began to see certain holes in the bureau's investigation.
  •  There were deaths by gunshot, explosions, poison, being pushed by a train. How many ways can you think of to commit murder? What made these murders so crazy was that people who seemed to figure out what was going on were murdered, too. The number of murders first estimated was 24 when in fact there were probably hundreds of murders that just weren't connected by a common thread. The murders also took place over a longer time period than originally suspected. Finally, descendants of the Osage from Molly's time period, when they'd meet Grann doing his research, viewed him as a hope. As a way to discover what really happened to their missing or mysteriously dead relatives.

In summary, the story was fascinating but the writing bogged it down. One of the book club members mentioned that the movie rights have been picked up by a studio. This could be an engaging movie as long as the action is captivating and the storytelling is concise.





How did we live before the internet?

How Did We Live Before the Internet?

And I'm not talking about e-books versus paper books. That's a subject for a whole other blog post.

As I sat down to write my review of Killers of the Flower Moon the other day, my computer started doing some very weird things. I turned the computer off and then turned it back on. Isn't that supposed to be the best fix available? It didn't work. Once I turned the computer back on, after it reconfigured and installed updates and whatever it does when I'm not looking, I no longer had access to the internet! At all.

I had places to go and people to see so I turned the computer off again and walked away, hoping that maybe the walking away for a few hours would make a difference. And it seemed to. I came home from Books & Beer Club, happy and tired. I turned on my computer, and lo and behold, I was once again connected to the wider world.  I was happy and tired, tired being a key word, so I plopped down on the couch and watched some TV and went to bed, planning to get to the review the next day.

Only when I turned my computer back on, I was no longer connected to the internet. The computer itself seemed fine, thank goodness. But I wasn't connected to anyone or anything.

A few years ago, in the days before portable devices, I probably would have totally freaked out. But I've got a desktop, a laptop, a tablet and a phone. So personally, I was still connected. But I couldn't do the few things that I rely on my desktop computer to be able to do.

Six hours of tinkering and canned air spraying and reorganizing our entire office so that my desktop could be hardwire connected to our router, it appeared as though my wifi adapter has been fried.

Thirty years ago, most of the words I have just typed were not in my vocabulary. Many of them weren't even words or concepts yet. Lots and lots has changed.

And yes, I love the internet... and I love my e-books!

Tuesday, June 19, 2018

A Wrinkle in Time, the movie






While staying at my stepdaughter's house, I noticed the DVD package of A Wrinkle in Time on the kitchen counter. My granddaughters' other grandmother has a Disney DVD subscription and she'd purchased it for our granddaughters, 10 and 8. As soon as the kids came home from school that afternoon, I asked them if I'd be able to watch the movie before I left for home. We set a day for 2 mornings later.

Of the 3 adults and 2 children that sat down to watch the movie, I was the only one who had previously read the book. The movie was more straightforward and easier to understand than the novel. But as is usually the case, the story just didn't go as deep.

Meg Murray, the main character, is still out to save her father who has gone missing. Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who and Mrs.... (okay what was the third Mrs. W's name?) are still in the story although not as well developed. Meg's younger brother, Charles Wallace, wasn't the child prodigy he was in the book. There were no twin older brothers. We get none of the back story about Calvin's back story making his involvement in the attempt to find Meg's father a little bit confusing.

The adventures that the trio of Meg, Charles Wallace and Calvin experience are visually quite beautiful. But they lack the emphasis on the evils of other worlds.

What I liked best about the book was watching the transformation of Meg from a girl who feels like she doesn't fit in anywhere to be a girl much more comfortable in her own skin and in her place in both her family and the greater world. That was missing from the moving.

What I liked best about the movie was the importance of family. If you have family, you have it all.

I don't know if I'd recommend the movie or not. But I did really love the cinematic aspects of this adaptation of a popular Newberry Prize winner.

I'm a sucker for an Adriana Trigiani book

Kiss Carlo, Adriana Trigiani's latest novel, is not my favorite Trigiani novel. But I knew it would be a sweet, quick read. Perfect for me on vacation.

The novel is set in post-WWII South Philadelphia. It's a story about family feuds, about Italian connections, about theater, about passions, about forgivess, about finding one's self. It's about race, it's about friendship, it's about controlling your own destiny. In retrospect, it was probably about too much. She could have easily written a series involving the characters in this book with each aspect of the plot given more prominence.

Even though I didn't love this book, I think what made me enjoy it is as much as I did is because the main character, surprisingly not named Carlo but rather Nicky, grows up in South Philadelphia where my daughter lives. And he finds himself at a local theater. My daughter works at a local theater. It doesn't hurt that my husband is Italian and Italian families and their stories hold a special place in my heart.

There was also a Holocaust/Jewish connection in the book. One of the cousins married a war bride from Poland. She was so integrated into the Italian family, but Nicky realized that there was something from her past that she missed. She missed being Jewish.

Much of the book was predictable but that didn't make it any less enjoyable to me.

I wonder if these characters will be back in another novel.

The fifth grade teacher in me...





You can take the teacher out of the classroom but you can't take the mindset of being in the classroom out of the teacher. It was only when I was searching for books to read on vacation that I came across Chelsea Clinton's children's picture book, She Persisted: 13 American Women who Changed the World. (There's another follow-up book called She Persisted Around the World: 13 Women Who Changed History.


The material covered material I taught my fifth grade classroom. I was visiting with my granddaughter who will be starting fifth grade in the fall. I thought I'd read the book and see if I felt it was something worthwhile for her to read.

I'm wondering what age child this book was really written for. It's way too sketchy to be of much value to a fifth grader. It's most appropriate as a book that a parent might read aloud to a younger child at home. Women have been changing the world for centuries.

The book is not at all political. It's nicely done. But as I said, it didn't have enough meat in it for it to be a book that I would have bought to have in my classroom library.

The usefulness of travel guides

I feel as though I haven't traveled much in the past few years, but whenever I do some serious travel or really intend to make the most of my time at some destination, I research endlessly online about my destination. And then once I'm there, especially if I'm somewhere where I don't have full access to the internet, I wish I had brought along a guide book. Or that I'd taken better notes while researching on the internet.

I went to Bermuda on a cruise a few weeks ago. We were going to have from Wednesday morning to Friday afternoon in Bermuda and I wanted to make the most of my time.

Rather than researching on my computer and taking notes, I did my research on my iPad and took screen captures of anything that I thought I might want once I was away from the internet. I also, for the very first time, checked out an e-book travel guide from the library that I had on my iPad. I was surprised at how easy it was to find Fodor's Bermuda guide at one of my libraries. I didn't think it would really matter that the edition was two years old. I don't think I was aware that a more current edition had just come out, but even if I had been, I wasn't prepared to spend money on the guide so what I had was going to do.

I started reading the guide before we left home. I compared what I was reading in the guide to some of the research I'd done online. I made mental notes of things I'd want to do once I got to Bermuda. Truthfully, though, all that information became a jumble in my brain that I hoped would make sense once I was there.

The research I'd done on sites like TripAdvisor or the Bermuda Tourist Board proved a little more useful than reading the guide book. Even though the guide book had a section for tourists arriving in Bermuda by a cruise, most of the book just didn't apply.

After spending a full day on a guided tour of Bermuda, I went back and reviewed some of the historical information that the fellow who led my tour had mentioned. It was a nice reinforcement and helped me remember a lot of what I'd seen.

In this day and age, I'm wondering if a print version of a guide book makes sense. But it was a nice addition to my iPad and didn't take up any extra room in my suitcase.I'll be sure to search for an e-book edition of a destination guide book the next time I go wandering.

To answer your unspoken question, I really enjoyed Bermuda. I loved the cruise as well as I expected but I ended up liking Bermuda much more than I expected. We had lots and lots of rain, both at sea and while in port, so I'm thinking another visit to Bermuda is definitely in order! The history geek in me still needs to explore St. George's.

The Continuation of Stieg Larrson's Millennium Series

I read the original 3 Stieg Larsson Lisbeth Salander books, the first three of the Millennium Series, several years ago for book club. Same book club selected book #5 as our June title.

Stieg Larson published The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, the first book in the series, back in 2008. I read the books out of order. 1, then 3, then 2. Three, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, the best. I didn't love it. I liked it. And I liked it better than the other two.

After being unable to get through my Jo Nesbo book a few months ago, I was reluctant to read another Scandinavian author. I wasn't bothered by the fact that I hadn't read the 4th book, The Girl in the Spider's Web, since I had no problem reading book 3 before #2, The Girl Who Played with Fire.

I'm wondered if I'd remember enough of the series for it to make sense. And I wondered what I'd feel about this book in the series being penned by a different author.

I remembered plenty. The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye could easily be a standalone book, although having read earlier books in the series made me a whole lot more familiar with the characters. No problem there.

And truth be told, I think I preferred David Lagercrantz's writing style better than Stieg Larsson's. It wasn't that different, but just enough different for me to notice a preference. Then again, it could be that I preferred the translator who worked on this book better than earlier translators.

A lot in the book seemed very timely. Talks of disinformation and fake news. Fake tweeting. Hacker attacks. There's reference to a stock market collapse. I'm assuming it's fictional since I'm pretty sure a collapse not too long ago would be something I'd remember. But I found the explanation of the collapse pretty interesting. It describes the stock market as being  all about faith and dreams and anxieties and convictions.

Crime fiction is not a genre I'd pick up on my own but I try to read everything my community book club reads even if I'm not going to be attending the meeting. (Have I ever mentioned that I lead the community book club?) I am curious what others thought of the book but so far no one is talking.

I would definitely recommend this novel to anyone who read and enjoyed any earlier books in the Millennium Series.