Readalikes: If you enjoyed June's selection . . .

If you enjoyed Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann, then you might also enjoy these books suggested by our discussion group members:

• The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America and others by Erik Larson
• One Summer: America 1927 by Bill Bryson
• Blood Moon: An American Epic of War and Splendor in the Cherokee Nation by John Sedgwick
• Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History by S. C. Gwynne
• Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City by Greg Grandin
• The Son: A Novel by Philipp Meyer
• Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

June Not Fiction Book Discussions

"History is a merciless judge. It lays bare our tragic blunders and foolish missteps and exposes our most intimate secrets, wielding the power of insight like an arrogant detective who seems to know the end of the mystery from the outset." Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann tells the nearly-forgotten story of a series of murders of Osage Indians in the early 1900s and the deep-rooted culture of prejudice that made them possible.

Following the discovery of a large oil field under Osage land in northeastern Oklahoma, the Osage became the wealthiest people per capita in the world. Predictably perhaps in hindsight, Osage who held headrights to the oil land were systematically manipulated into signing over their rights and wealth to white citizens who were their financial guardians, their bankers, their physicians, their neighbors, and their families, and then were murdered. The murders went unsolved until J. Edgar Hoover used a limited number of the cases to burnish the reputation of the newly established Federal Bureau of Investigation. In researching this Reign of Terror, David Grann discovered that the murders went beyond the few prosecuted by Hoover and his detectives and indicated a "culture of killing" in which all levels of society were implicated. Grann told Rolling Stone,

This is as close a story to good and evil as I ever came across. I spent so much time with the evil that it was very disconcerting. But I really was determined not to just catalog the victims. I wanted to find the descendants who could help try to give the dead some voice. . . . One of the things that I wanted to try to show, hopefully, in the book by telling it through three different points of view--the Osage and Mollie Burkhart, Tom White and then me in the present--was to show the process of the accumulation of knowledge that only unfolds over time. Each person, as they live through history, can't see it all. There's a tendency when we write history to do it with the power of hindsight and then assume almost god-like knowledge that nobody living through history has. . . . I discovered there is a limited trail of evidence; there are gaps. I had always kind of assumed that history was kind of a horror that you know. And this was a story that left me profoundly with a sensation of maybe the real horror is what we don't know.

What do you think? We are familiar with many historical American crimes and criminals from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from movies, books, and television shows. Why do you think the story of the Osage murders hasn't received similar attention? How does the story Grann tells differ from the traditional kinds of stories of the American West we are used to hearing and seeing? Killers of the Flower Moon combines the fast pace of a true crime murder mystery with the scope and detail of narrative history and investigative journalism. How does Grann integrate these different aspects of the book and take it beyond a voyeuristic true crime story? What was your first impression of William Hale? Grann introduces him with an allusion to one of William Faulkner's most complicated characters from the novel Absalom, Absalom!: "Like a real-life version of Faulkner's Thomas Sutpen, he seemed to have come out of nowhere--a man with no known past." What does this allusion tell us about Hale? About American history and culture? What qualities does Hale share with this fictional character and with people who achieve power and influence today? What about Hoover? What kind of person was he? How did the bureaucracy he created help to conceal the extent and true horror of the Osage murders? In contrast, describe Tom White. How does he differ from so many other people described in the book? What do the contemporary media reports on the wealth of the Osage and the investigations into the murders reflect about white perceptions of Native Americans? How did they influence the way the murders were treated by law enforcement? Are there historical examples of racial prejudice and injustice that parallel those described in Killers of the Flower Moon? How about recent examples? Has anything changed about the approach taken by media and law enforcement? About the attitudes expressed by the white community in the face of racial, religious, or other discrimination? In what ways have things remained the same?

We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, June 5, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, June 21, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.