Utterly absorbing.
For two decades, a Ghanaian con man surfed a wave of lies and luck, living large on multiple continents while swindling “millions upon millions of dollars.”
“This is a story of how lies change history,” writes Ghanaian journalist Yeebo. The lies at the center of her story are those of Dr. John Ackah Blay-Miezah, whose name and title were both lies. He claimed to hold the key to the (nonexistent) Oman Ghana Trust Fund, billions of dollars supposedly spirited out of Ghana by its first president, Kwame Nkrumah, and held in Swiss banks, ensnaring investors in a classic fraud. Yeebo makes clear that Blay-Miezah’s lies were founded on other lies—first those of the British colonizers, who “siphoned off over 150 million pounds” that were to have been held in reserve pending independence, and then those of the U.S. and British governments, which helped engineer the 1966 coup that toppled Nkrumah. The racism that underlay these actions also propelled many of Blay-Miezah’s investors, who “saw [him] spinning a tale about darkest Africa, untold wealth, and a corrupt leader….[T]he story—and the man—fit their preconceptions like a dovetail joint.” The great tragedy, writes the author, is that Blay-Miezah’s lies have become one of Ghana’s foundational myths. It’s an incredible story, told with muscular acerbity and populated by secondary characters as compelling as the leading man. There’s the diplomat duo of Shirley Temple Black, U.S. ambassador to Ghana, and Ebenezer Moses Debrah, Ghana’s former ambassador to the U.S.; Gladys Blay-Miezah, Blay-Miezah’s second wife, whose ability to track down her philandering husband earned her the nickname Columbo; and Joe Appiah, who successfully prosecuted Blay-Miezah in Ghanaian court only to see him freed after a brutal coup. Even as she catches readers up in what often reads like a breathless caper, the author takes care to ground them in what matters most: Ghana and its sadly “fragile” history.
Utterly absorbing.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781635574739
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
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 Yorkerstaff 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
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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