Artfully developed tale of uncommon people and some photographs once lost.
An antiquarian book dealer explores the nexus of a Times Square dime museum and the art-photo market.
At the heart of the sideshow business in New York until the mid 1960s, Hubert’s Dime Museum and Flea Circus was often celebrated, most notably by the New Yorker’s A.J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell—to both of whom Gibson (Demon of the Waters: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Whaleship Globe, 2002, etc.) dedicates this book. For many years, Hubert’s manager and “talker” (“barker” to the rubes) was dignified Charlie Lucas, an African-American who frequently doubled as a savage warrior chief or as WooFoo, the “Immune Man.” Lucas also performed a Dance of Love with his attractive wife, a snake charmer billed as Princess Sahloo or sometimes simply Woogie. He stored his odd, wonderful journal and sideshow ephemera along with a stash of photos in a trunk that, after his death, eventually came into the possession of Bob Langmuir, an acquisitive and paranoid Philadelphia book dealer. Langmuir determined that the photos were the work of Diane Arbus, who had been introduced by Lucas to many of her subjects, including diminutive Andy Potato Chips, tattooed Jack Dracula and Congo the Jungle Creep. Gibson deftly tells the story of the collection’s acquisition by Langmuir, the authentication of the pictures as Arbus’s work and the efforts to value, display and market them. He novelistically chronicles the burdens of discovery and ownership, entwining these topics with such additional themes as the unraveling of personality, the rigors of love (requited or not) and marriage (functional or not). He brings together eccentric character studies, oddball action on old 42nd Street and complex art-world maneuvers to yield some classic Americana. The Arbus/Hubert’s collection is scheduled for international exhibition and a New York auction in April.
Artfully developed tale of uncommon people and some photographs once lost.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-15-101233-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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