Killers of the Flower Moon

The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI

347 pages

Published April 18, 2017 by Vintage.

ISBN:
978-0-385-53425-3
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4 stars (50 reviews)

1 edition

A Dark Darker than Dirt under a Coffin

5 stars

This book carried me along and I had trouble stopping the ride. I also had to text people and talk about it. And it made me uncomfortable. My friend Ellen passed it to me at lunch, which seemed unusual but I get it now. I want to give it to other people and I've told people to read it. Which seems strange since it's been popular and made into a blockbuster movie. But uh, it deserves it.

Highly recommended. (★ ★ ★ ★ ★)

The first section is a murder mystery. The Osage are being killed! We attempt to find who done it! We investigate, we get autopsies and hire detectives and we do our darn best, but it's just so hard and mysteriously every lead dries up and every witness dies and why?! Who can save the Osage? We can't do it and maybe it's impossible for us.

In …

Review of 'Killers of the Flower Moon' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

This was an informative and disturbing history of events in the 1920s in the state of Oklahoma. For readers who are stressed out by recent political fighting in the 21st century, this story shows that the intersection of racism, power, and corruption is a longstanding theme in American affairs--both locally and nationally. I’m happy to have learned about this history, though sad to have discovered the inner workings of how the Osage were treated for so long. Overall, I’d recommend this book. However, I found the writing style distracting. I think it’s the attempt to pack the collection of many details and sequences of deep research into a narrative. The stylistic affect is that it’s aimed too low. With all the transitions of “One day, two men were out hunting,” “One day, Hale’s pastures were set on fire,” I often felt like I was reading a 6th grade SRA card. …

Review of 'Killers of the Flower Moon' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

I have been reading this book off and on for a while, and when I read that they are going to make a movie of it, I decided I should power thru and finish it. And I am glad I did! It tells the story of the Osage Indian murders in the 1920s. The Osage Indians were, like many tribes. forced onto "barren" lands as a reservation, but it turned into a real gold mine, as oil was discovered there. Soon, the Osage were among the richest people in the world.

Of course, white man couldn't have that and quickly started passing laws declaring the Native Americans were too "child like" to have that much money and the only thing that would save them would be white guardianship. And you don't need much of an imagination to see what kinds of corruption and thieving that led to.

Even worse was …

Review of 'Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI' on Goodreads

4 stars

Good history whodunnit with an entertaining blend of personal detail and broader context. Covers a period of transition for the US nation, the Osage nation, and for national law enforcement, and reminds us that these histories are a dynamic process, despite the advantage to those with power to proclaim them solved and in the past.

Review of 'Killers of the Flower Moon' on 'Storygraph'

5 stars

This book was a riveting read, although I’m not sure riveting is quite the right word. The book grabs you with the atrocities of the events described and the writing supports the emotional devastation inherent in the stories themselves.

This book follows a series of events that, like many events surrounding the indigenous peoples of this continent, are generally unknown. I found the telling of the events to be engrossing as it read very much like a non fiction piece — except, of course, it is all real.

Grann also does a pretty good job of showcasing native perspectives and voices — at no point during the book did I feel like he fell into the tired tropes often seen in the media. In fact, he was surprisingly self aware about those same tropes and often pointed them out in other media.

Definitely would recommend.

Review of 'Killers of the Flower Moon' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Lawmen were then still largely amateurs. They rarely attended training academies or steeped themselves in the emerging scientific methods of detection, such as the analysis of fingerprints and blood patterns. Frontier lawmen, in particular, were primarily gunfighters and trackers; they were expected to deter crimes and to apprehend a known gunman alive if possible, dead if necessary. “An officer was then literally the law and nothing but his judgment and his trigger finger stood between him and extermination,” the Tulsa Daily World said in 1928, after the death of a veteran lawman who’d worked in the Osage territory. “It was often a case of a lone man against a pack of cunning devils.” Because these enforcers received pitiful salaries and were prized for being quick draws, it’s not surprising that the boundary between good lawmen and bad lawmen was porous. The leader of the Dalton Gang, an infamous nineteenth-century band …
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