A mixed bag of essays, mostly good, on America’s strangest city. Las Vegas, writes Wall Street Journal correspondent Littlejohn (Architect: The Life and Work of Charles W. Moore, 1984, etc.), is the ultimate company town, a huge and growing city that pretends to economic diversity while drawing most of its revenue from a single industry: casino gambling. Visitors to the city leave behind some $5 billion annually at the gaming tables, to say nothing of billions more at hotels, restaurants, and shopping centers; small wonder, Littlejohn suggests, that so many other American cities and states are plunging headlong into legalized, government-controlled lotteries and casinos. And small wonder, he adds, that so many people are now flocking to Las Vegas to stake a share in the jackpot: between 1990 and 1997 the metropolitan area grew by an astonishing 48 percent, “a record no other large U.S. county even comes close to matching.” This growth, in Littlejohn’s view, is of itself neither good nor bad; it merely is. His contributors take a similarly morally distanced, reportorial point of view. One, Boston Globe writer Marie Sanchez, travels inside a Las Vegas high school to find widespread drug use, alienation, violence, and a penchant—at least among girls—to turn to prostitution for spending money around Christmas; another, freelance journalist Lisa Moskowitz, looks into the surging growth of housing in the Las Vegas Valley, a growth that comes in defiance of all economic sense—and of the arid realities of this desert place; still another, magazine editor Lori Leibovich, writes of the seemingly contradictory rise of vast “megachurches” that rival the casinos for architectural splendor. Not all the pieces are as good, but the volume adds up to a valuable snapshot of America’s fastest-growing city. (For another tour of Las Vegas, see David Thomson, In Nevada, p. 1213.)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-19-513070-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1999
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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