It may be, as Tarnoff asserts, that these writers spent the best years of their lives in California, but only Twain, living...
Four ambitious writers star in this literary history.
Journalist Tarnoff (A Counterfeiter’s Paradise: The Wicked Lives and Surprising Adventures of Three Early American Moneymakers, 2011) tells a lively story of mid-19th-century San Francisco, focused on champagne-swilling Mark Twain, foppish Bret Harte, poet and essayist Charles Warren Stoddard, and little-remembered poet Ina Coolbrith. Despite the book’s hyperbolic subtitle, Tarnoff does not make a case for these writers’ revolutionary impact on American literature; nor, in fact, that Stoddard and Coolbrith had any impact at all. In the 1860s, Harte was well-known for humorous short stories about California life, but by 1871, when he came East for a speaking tour, his career was over. “It was the corpse of that Bret Harte that swept in splendor across the continent,” Mark Twain announced. Although Twain had by then reconciled with his one-time rival, he did not mourn Harte’s literary downfall. His star was rising, partly due to his recognition by William Dean Howells, the influential editor of the Atlantic Monthly; partly due to his status as a brilliant performer who attracted huge audiences to his one-man shows; partly due to the fact that readers east of the Mississippi were enthralled by fiction set on the raunchy frontier. Exuberant stories gave the young nation new myths, establishing the West as “a place of paradox and incongruity, where conventional rules of sentiment and syntax broke down, and humor overlaid everything.” Twain proved to be a master of this new genre. In such works as Innocents Abroad, a best-seller in 1869, Twain’s characters were ordinary middle Americans, honest, open and free of an old-world veneer of sophistication: “They belonged to a country of the future: an innovative, economically ascendant nation with a style all its own.”
It may be, as Tarnoff asserts, that these writers spent the best years of their lives in California, but only Twain, living in New York and Connecticut, left a lasting literary legacy.Pub Date: March 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59420-473-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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
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 2026 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.
