Bursting at the seams with icy facts and trivia.
A lively history of ice in America.
Environmental historian Brady, executive director of Orion magazine, takes a wide-ranging, comprehensive tour of places and people associated with our frosty obsession. Frederic Tudor’s idea of shipping blocks of ice from post–Revolutionary War Massachusetts to Martinique and selling them didn’t go well. It went better in Cuba and New Orleans, where ice and liquor paired well, and Tudor’s ice-cutters and icehouses were a big success. Florida doctor John Gorrie’s experiments using ice on yellow fever victims led to his groundbreaking invention of a hand-cranked ice-making machine. Their use in hospitals and shipping was transformative. With the advent of cars, people could stop at their local ice dock, and icemen and their wagons, as popular as milkmen, were popping up all over in popular culture. In the 1930s, General Electric began manufacturing affordable refrigerators. A visit to Mount Vernon taught Brady about Washington’s slaves harvesting ice on the Potomac for his well, which fed his love of ice cream. In 1818, Philadelphia free Black man Augustus Jackson’s ice cream was a sensation. Ice cream peddlers became commonplace, and the sundae, iced tea, and Good Humor ice cream bar were born, as were electric air conditioners and cocktail bars like Manhattan’s influential Milk and Honey. The author also visited Bill Covitz, a master ice sculptor, to watch as a laser cut designs from massive blocks. In 1887, St. Paul, Minnesota, made a big splash with its 14-story ice castle, constructed of 30,000 blocks of ice. “Mechanically created ice could transform ice sports as we know them,” Brady notes, as she uncovers the indoor worlds of ice skating, hockey, speed skating, and curling. In 1949, Frank Zamboni unveiled his eponymous machine, which could resurface an entire rink in 15 minutes. The author also investigates why ice is so slippery, and she concludes her spirited book with a look at the dire effects of cold and making ice on an endangered planet.
Bursting at the seams with icy facts and trivia.Pub Date: June 6, 2023
ISBN: 9780593422199
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
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 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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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