What I Read -- Killers of the Flower Moon

I heard an interview with David Grann on NPR near the time that Killers of the Flower Moon was released, and wanted to read it immediately.  As so often happens, though, time got away from me.

Then E read it and suggested it as a possibility for our postal book club.  There was a catch: we have, historically, enforced a 250-page limit for postal book club books.  This rule was initially put in place to keep the pressure of the whole project low; no one would be getting a 1200-page doorstop that they needed to plow through.  We had previously considered making some exceptions for longer-than-250-page books if they were something that all three of us have on our to-read list, and Killers of the Flower Moon fit the bill.

I took it with me when S and I went to the Pacific Northwest for vacation.  It was both a great and terrible pick for that trip -- great, because it's fun to read a book on vacation that you just can't put down; terrible, because I got through it so quickly!

As the subtitle indicates, this is a look at a tiny piece of history which had far-reaching implications.  When the Osage Indians were being displaced from their land, they were resettled on property in Oklahoma that was rich with oil reserves.  Then, in the 1920s, Osage Indians with "head rights" (an ownership interest in the oil) started mysteriously dying.  Things came to a head when the then-newly-installed FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover brought in a former Texas Ranger to investigate.

This book was fast-paced, readable, and fascinating.  It is everything I think of when people refer to "narrative non-fiction," which has always struck me as an odd description.  It's not a genre, exactly, but it does convey a certain propulsive plot, which this book has in spades.

My only complaint comes at the end, when the author delves into his personal efforts to locate additional victims; it seemed unnecessary and a little bit self-congratulatory in a way that I did not particularly appreciate.