by Margaret Guroff ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 2016
A bright, enthusiastic cultural history.
Two hundred years of the bicycle in America.
In her sprightly debut history, Guroff (Writing/Johns Hopkins Univ.), executive editor of AARP The Magazine, traces America’s “on-again, off-again romance” with the bicycle, from its 1819 iteration as the draisine to the current vogue in urban bike-sharing stations. Invented in Germany by Karl von Drais, the draisine was a two-wheeled vehicle with no pedals. A rider “straddled the saddle, gripped the tiller, and propelled the draisine like a scooter,” pushing off the ground and allowing it to coast. Unwieldy and heavy, the draisine quickly lost appeal. Some 50 years later, though, the pedal-cranked velocipede became a national obsession. “Nationwide,” writes the author, “carriage makers were churning out bicycles at a rate of a thousand a week, which reportedly filled only one-tenth of the orders being placed for them.” But this fad fizzled because they could only be ridden comfortably on indoor rinks; roads were so rutted that bicycles earned the epithet “boneshakers.” After pneumatic tires and lighter weight made the machines easier to ride, cyclists created cinder- or gravel-covered paths, many of which later were paved over for cars. Still, interest waned in the 1890s but was spurred when magazines created a voracious consumer culture. Once marketed and bought by men, bicycles became coveted by women, who saw in them potential for liberation, including liberation from corsets and floor-length skirts. Beginning in the 1910s, suburban children were identified by bicycle manufacturers as a rich new market. A boy with a bicycle, touted one ad, “will be the king of the neighborhood.” Guroff makes a solid case for the bicycle as transformative in times of war (it was useful during World War I, for example, as “unobtrusive, gasoline- and forage-free transport”), and she maintains that bicycles inspired the Wright brothers in their airplane design.
A bright, enthusiastic cultural history.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-292-74362-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Univ. of Texas
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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