Oney's book praised

Nice in-depth treatment in the latest New York Review of Books for Steve Oney's impressive 742-page investigation of anti-Semitism and racism in Georgia, And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank.

Steve Oney, an Atlanta native and journalist, has evoked in And the Dead Shall Rise a grim and teeming ghost story of one such infamous instance: beginning in 1913, the arrest, conviction, and eventual lynching of Leo Frank, the Jewish superintendent of a pencil factory, after the murder of a thirteen-year-old girl, Mary Phagan, who worked in his plant.

From seventeen years of research, Oney's prodigious excavation of that distant dark episode is, like most efforts of its ambitious scale, not without its excesses —an overpopulous cast of accessory players and a kudzu-like proliferation of peripheral circumstances, along with a certain tendency to employ the melodramatic phrasings of the period as if from too deep an immersion in its voices and papers.

But what ultimately emerges is a monumental folk parable of innocent suffering and a blind, brutal urge for retribution that passes finally into the simple, stark awe and pity of tragedy.

The review is by Marshall Frady, the author of Wallace, Billy Graham, Southerners, Jesse: The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson, and, most recently, Martin Luther King, Jr. He is now at work on a biography of Fidel Castro. Oney lives in Los Angeles with his wife, designer Madeline Stuart.