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"Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI"

Aired on Thursday, April 27th.

Our guest on this installment of ST is David Grann, a bestselling author and staff writer at The New Yorker Magazine whose new book, just out, is getting rave reviews. That  book is an unsettling and in-depth work of nonfiction, "Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI." As was noted of this book by a critic writing for Time: "Nearly 100 years ago, the Osage tribe of Oklahoma were thought to be the wealthiest people per capita in the world, thanks to their oil-rich reservation, kindly sold back to them by the federal government that had snatched it away. The hundreds of millions of dollars that spewed from those wells funded lavish mansions, chauffeured cars, and couture wardrobes for the Osage. They'd have been richer still -- perhaps not striving at a 20% poverty rate today -- were it not for the parasitic Getty dynasty and others. Or for the fact that the Osage began to be systemically murdered, a crime David Grann examines in his unsurprisingly extraordinary new book.... What at first seemed to be coincidental killings came to fit a pattern of conspiracy. As the body count ticked higher and the few white men trying to help the tribe became victims, the crisis catalyzed the formation of the FBI.... [This book] leaves the reader with a sense of injustice not truly avenged, and it's no fault of the author -- it's American history." Please note that David Grann will appear at a Book Smart Tulsa reading and signing on Monday night, May 1st, at 7pm at the OSU-Tulsa auditorium.

Rich Fisher passed through KWGS about thirty years ago, and just never left. Today, he is the general manager of Public Radio Tulsa, and the host of KWGS’s public affairs program, StudioTulsa, which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in August 2012 . As host of StudioTulsa, Rich has conducted roughly four thousand long-form interviews with local, national, and international figures in the arts, humanities, sciences, and government. Very few interviews have gone smoothly. Despite this, he has been honored for his work by several organizations including the Governor's Arts Award for Media by the State Arts Council, a Harwelden Award from the Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa, and was named one of the “99 Great Things About Oklahoma” in 2000 by Oklahoma Today magazine.
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