The Deuce is where the city never sleeps, and this sharp blend of analysis and visualization keeps it jumping. (16-page...
Crisp, sociable cultural paleontology of New York City's fabled crossroads.
In its heyday, 42nd Street was “the quintessence of the quintessential American metropolis—excessive, expensive, unpredictable, loud, fun, and a bit dangerous,” Business Week staffer Bianco (The Reichmanns, 1997, etc.) writes. But not so expensive that it wouldn’t serve as the birthplace of mass-market entertainment high and low, as the swath of theaters mixed comfortably with the naughty, bawdy, and gaudy, the classy burlesques tuned so as not to offend middle-class proprieties. What elevated 42nd Street above pure spectacle, explains Bianco in his always clear voice, was that it was not just a showbiz mecca, but also the home of the New York Times, a gathering place for civic events, a work of public art with its swirl of lights from the electronic signs and billboards. Pausing only to provide zesty portraits of significant players on the scene, from Oscar Hammerstein to the Disney Corporation, Bianco carefully digs down through the street’s various layers: the closing of the theaters due to the Depression; its tenure as a haven for B movies; its sleazy apotheosis in the 1970s, when “42nd Street and the rest of Times Square had become so extreme in their degradation, so utterly despoiled, that they were perversely appealing.” Then he tackles a more subtle and complex issue. When the city government ineptly flexed its muscles in an attempt to cauterize the Street’s past, countervailing forces sparked by the Playwrights Horizons theater company sought to protect the ancient haunts from disappearing down the maw of corporate development. Will this harbinger of downtown rebirth reflect the government’s politically cynical notions about redevelopment, Bianco asks, or will it bespeak “private citizens practicing an organic kind of urban renewal, one small-scale project at a time”?
The Deuce is where the city never sleeps, and this sharp blend of analysis and visualization keeps it jumping. (16-page b&w photo insert, not seen)Pub Date: April 13, 2004
ISBN: 0-688-17089-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2004
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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