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A review by daumari
Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann
challenging
informative
mysterious
sad
tense
fast-paced
5.0
It's funny, when I pull up the page the first "Readers also enjoyed:" title is James, our other Biere Library book club pick for this period (though our theme was bestsellers so... tautological conclusion). We read The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder in summer of 2023, so I knew I liked David Grann's narrative nonfiction, but focusing on events that happened within the last 100 years meant he had much more direct sources to work from (versus 1700s records which I still think he used to great effect in The Wager).
REALLY compelling story. You can feel the sense of dread as people in Mollie's family start to die, and the frustration as Tom White comes in with his investigators and key potential witnesses also start to die (and then also in the third section where Grann steps out from behind the pen and talks about when he started researching the Osage murders the depth and how widespread they are beyond the Burkhart family, like staggering how many members of the community were killed and how complicit and casual the white people in their lives were about it. It makes me think about the lives we currently dismiss as acceptable collateral for greed and how we might look back on it a century from now.
just like... the number of people willing to get married and murder their spouses is astonishing. I can see why people thought "hey, this would make a great film".
REALLY compelling story. You can feel the sense of dread as people in Mollie's family start to die, and the frustration as Tom White comes in with his investigators and key potential witnesses also start to die (and then also in the third section where Grann steps out from behind the pen and talks about when he started researching the Osage murders the depth and how widespread they are beyond the Burkhart family, like staggering how many members of the community were killed and how complicit and casual the white people in their lives were about it. It makes me think about the lives we currently dismiss as acceptable collateral for greed and how we might look back on it a century from now.
just like... the number of people willing to get married and murder their spouses is astonishing. I can see why people thought "hey, this would make a great film".