New York buffs, especially those nostalgic for a grittier time, will find this a learned pleasure.
A lively portrait of New York’s “other street,” once a byword for urban degradation and now just another site of gentrification.
It was in the cards a long time ago that the Bowery, Manhattan’s roughest, toughest street, would one day be cleaned up. After all, observes journalist Alexiou (The Flatiron: The New York Landmark and the Incomparable City that Arose with It, 2010, etc.), “the Dutch founded New Amsterdam not as a religious refuge but as a place to do business, and this remains Manhattan’s ethos to this day.” Now, says Bowery resident and advocate Adam Woodward, “every fifty years, the city tears down, and rebuilds.” That cycle seems about right. In the late 1960s, the Bowery, that stretch of road that begins at Houston Street and descends south into what used to be tenements full of Irish and then Chinese newcomers to the city, was just on the brink of becoming a cultural icon of a different type, courtesy of Hilly Kristal and his raw-boned nightclub CBGB, which helped launch “four kids from Queens who sported spiky haircuts and black leather jackets.” Alexiou’s cast of characters includes Patti Smith and Lou Reed, to be sure, but also figures from the past who shaped the city in various ways, from theatrical entrepreneur Henry Astor, the bane of his richer brother John Jacob, to Tammany politician and proud Bowery patois speaker Timothy Daniel Sullivan. In 1957, the area was the setting for the semidocumentary On the Bowery, another cultural milestone that “endured among the art house crowd” and influenced the filmmaking styles of Martin Scorsese and John Cassavetes. Now such a film would be impossible, given an ever growing number of high-rise luxury apartments, tony restaurants, expensive boutiques, and other signs of hipsterism.
New York buffs, especially those nostalgic for a grittier time, will find this a learned pleasure.Pub Date: July 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-02138-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
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 Yorkerstaff 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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