September 2018 Bookclub News

Minnie, Anna and Mollie Burkhart

Dear Bookclub,

Our September meeting, so efficiently held at the end of August at the Barrel Room(well truly the Barrel Patio), had us delving into the sad story of the Osage Indians. Agreeing that the story is of great import, appreciating the atrocities and understanding the investigation, we also felt a bit bogged down and occasionally confused by Grann's telling. We are not alone, as Dwight Garner of the New York Times stated in his book review:

"If you taught the artificial brains of supercomputers at IBM Research to write nonfiction prose, and if they got very good at it, they might compose a book like David Grann’s “Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI.”"    He later mentions that this book, "never set its hooks in me" as the previous Grann work,  “The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon” (2009) did.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/12/books/review-killers-of-flower-moon-david-grann.html

A clean short telling in the following PBS link also includes the photos, not seen by me, as I'd listened to the audible version:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/the-forgotten-murders-of-the-osage-people-for-the-oil-beneath-their-land


 I hastily grabbed three enticing books from my groaning shelves to present for an upcoming selection:

"The Glass of Time" Michael Cox
"Peggy Guggenheim" Francine Prose
"Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher, The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis"
Timothy Egan. *chosen


As an aside, photographs by Edward Curtis and many others are on exhibit at the Annenberg Space for Photography:

https://www.annenbergphotospace.org/exhibits/not-an-ostrich/

I am so disappointed that I just discovered this because the exhibit closes September 9, 2018. But the museum looks intriguing. Please do watch the short video of the exhibit - just a marvelous collection of photographs from the Library of Congress.

Michael A. "Tony" Vaccaro. Architectural Hats, 1960

Unknown Brünnhilde. 1936

Up next: "Sing Unburied, Sing" Jesmyn Ward

Happy reading,
LK