Agreeable, old-fashioned cultural history: heavy on anecdotes, light on analysis.
From literary scholar Weber (Hired Pens, 1997, etc.), a vivid account of colorful characters and mostly ephemeral publications enlivening expatriate life from the end of the First World War to the beginning of the Second.
Notwithstanding his academic credentials (American Studies Emeritus/Univ. of Notre Dame), the author doesn’t provide any unifying themes or discern any lasting cultural contributions made by the Americans who financed their agreeable sojourns overseas by writing, editing and proofreading for the not-terribly-distinguished newspapers and magazines published for their fellow expatriates. Instead, his enjoyable narrative offers lots of good stories about late nights, hard drinking and minimal amounts of work at the Paris Herald, the Paris Tribune and the Paris Times, as well as such magazines as The Boulevardier and the Paris Comet. A separate chapter chronicles the more substantive accomplishments of foreign correspondents for the Paris bureaus of American newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune and the New York Herald-Tribune as the threat of war darkened Europe. Female correspondents like the New Yorker’s Janet Flanner and the intrepid Martha Gellhorn and Dorothy Thompson (both of whom ranged far afield from Paris) also get their due, and another chapter examines the fiction produced when journalists got off their day jobs—Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer being the only enduring work in this category. In contrast, the bestselling memoirs of their European stints by Vincent Sheean, John Gunther and William L. Shirer remain widely read today. Other still-well-known names dotting the text include Ernest Hemingway, Eric Sevareid, Walter Kerr and Edward R. Murrow, who worked from London but recruited many Paris-based journalists for CBS Radio’s fledgling overseas coverage. But the more typical protagonists here are such semi-famous sorts as Waverly Root, Elliot Paul and Harold Stearns, most of whom bounced from paper to magazine to paper while enjoying la vie de bohème and—most notably in Stearns’s case—failing to live up to early predictions of their shining literary promise.
Agreeable, old-fashioned cultural history: heavy on anecdotes, light on analysis.Pub Date: April 7, 2006
ISBN: 1-56663-676-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2006
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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