A useful addition to Western Americana and women’s studies.
There weren’t many career opportunities open to women in the Wild West: schoolmarm, farm wife, perhaps stenographer. However, writes journalist and popular historian Morgan (Media Writing/Univ. of Texas, Arlington; Good Time Girls of the Alaska-Yukon Gold Rush, 1998, etc.) in this entertaining and instructive study, there was always a demand for prostitutes and brothel keepers, and many women naturally drifted into those ancient professions.
Profiling several of these women from the Gold Rush into the early years of the 20th century, the author makes it clear why this wasn’t necessarily a bad career move, especially on the management side. In Helena, Mont., the city’s 37 “independent, property-owning prostitutes” accounted for 44 percent of the real-estate transfers and sometimes acted as venture capitalists for local businesses; a dozen of them reported that they had bank accounts in excess of $2,500, while “even street whores without capital could expect to earn $223 a month”—this at a time when a skilled carpenter made half that. One hooker-turned-madam even opened a theater that became “a family favorite,” while others, mostly immigrants from Asia and Europe, provided financial anchors around which communities of their compatriots formed. Morgan’s subject, improperly treated, could easily devolve into a lascivious catalog, but she has an important larger point: The independence of these women inspired the independence of women who did not engage in the sex trade, and it’s no accident that women had the right to vote and served in political office in the West well before they did in other parts of the country. The author closes with Montana’s own Jeannette Rankin, elected to Congress in 1917, who got plenty done—even if, as Morgan writes, the press of the day “showed less interest in her legislative accomplishments than in whether she was having an affair with Fiorello LaGuardia.”
A useful addition to Western Americana and women’s studies.Pub Date: June 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-56976-338-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2011
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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