A thoroughly enjoyable time capsule for the turn of the century. (Author tour)
Fun and factual popular history tracing our present-day culture to its roots in the 1970s.
The 1970s? Absolutely, according to conservative analyst Frum (Dead Right, 1994; What’s Right, 1996), who here considers how very radical we Americans have become. Despite all the marches, assassinations, drugs, and music of the 1960s, Frum maintains that the "70s were more formative. A gas crisis, a crack epidemic, an economic slump, and disco aren't as sexy as hippies in the mud, but Frum persuasively demonstrates that our watershed years coincided with the Watergate era, when we retooled Detroit, launched the Information Age, and, true to the backlash reflected in the 1974 movie Death Wish, incarcerated criminals instead of blaming society. Frum crowns actor Alan Alda the "70s prototype of the newly sensitive man, echoing the tremulous emotion heard in crooners like James Taylor. He calls this vast "shift in emotional climate a kind of global moistening"; it allowed even male politicians to weep, another effect of the women's movement. The joy of sex seems to have been discovered in 1972: "Feminists like Germaine Greer championed promiscuity as a means to break women's `doglike' devotion to men, and the young women of the 1970s listened and obeyed." Virginity went out of style, even as women suddenly became police officers or bus drivers. All this put millions in day care, and divorce skyrocketed. Food turned global and had to be nutritious, a concern for health also demonstrated in new protective sports gear. Looking out for number one financially initiated our era's greed. The increase in stock investing, intensified with the Internet, began in the `70s. Before Dress Down Friday there was the 1970s jeans explosion. Today's politically correct minority visibility first emerged in the '70s. In short, it’s hard to spot a topic not covered here.
A thoroughly enjoyable time capsule for the turn of the century. (Author tour)Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-465-04195-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2000
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 Yorker staff 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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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