A pleasing book about books, deserving of a home in a bibliophile’s stacks.
A cozy history of the pre-megacorporate world of book publishing.
Don’t tell former Book-of-the-Month Club chief and Viking publisher Silverman that golden ages are mythical creatures. From the end of World War II to around the early years of the Reagan regime, editors published to their tastes, knowing that there would be a market somewhere for almost anything they produced—at least anything meritorious. Silverman approvingly records a visit the fledgling American publisher George Braziller paid to his English counterpart Allen Lane, asking his advice; Lane responded, “Take lots and lots of gambles, but small ones.” Braziller would do so by, among other things, hiring Dick Seaver, who would do fine publishing himself. Seaver worked with Barney Rosset, the great Grove Press publisher, who took plenty of gambles, sometimes rolling the dice against the censors. And everybody knew Roger Straus and Tom Dunne, as part of a nicely incestuous little world in which a few blocks of Manhattan became the center of national culture, at least insofar as it concerned the literate. Silverman neatly blends oral history and narrative history in telling the story of that world, though, happily, he leaves plenty of room for the coin of the realm—namely, gossip. Thus we learn that Straus, courtly and even fatherly to his authors, was a bear when it came to his editors—and to his own son, it seems, who left the family business to become a photographer—and that the sales conferences of old were fueled by red wine and even marijuana, “and then everyone would go dancing till four o’clock in the morning.” Elsewhere Silverman writes of roads not taken and missed opportunities, such as Esquire’s refusal to excerpt Joseph Heller’s now canonical novel Catch-22, Toni Morrison’s travails in finding her first publisher and Little, Brown’s loss of Gore Vidal to Random House over a little matter of real estate.
A pleasing book about books, deserving of a home in a bibliophile’s stacks.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-35003-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Truman Talley/St. Martin’s
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2008
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
