Good, smart, occasionally naughty adolescent fun.
A cultural history of teen movies—and, by extension, the American teenager.
Early in his second adult nonfiction book, Handy (Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children’s Literature as an Adult, 2017) notes that “teenager” is a largely social construction. It was only in the 1930s that the demographic became more than just young Americans unprotected by labor laws and instead a cohort with spending money, ambition, and an ability to shape the zeitgeist. Early entries in the teen-film field were tame and shaped by moral uprightness, particularly Mickey Rooney’s Andy Hardy films, where a first kiss was a gee-willikers event. (Handy has good fun exploring how Rooney’s off-screen antics countered his chaste screen persona.) But on-screen transgression soon became the order of the day, be it through James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, no-adults-allowed beach-party flicks, Sean Penn’s stoner antihero in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, John Hughes’ defiant middle-class teens, up through Katniss Everdeen’s defiant postapocalyptic herodom in the Hunger Games films. Handy smartly balances scratching the target reader’s nostalgic itch for details on the making of films like The Breakfast Club while also exploring how each iteration of the genre reflects a generation’s concerns. American Graffiti sublimated ’70s post-Watergate stress; Mean Girls underscored early-oughts status anxiety; Twilight was canny counterprogramming for a generation overwhelmed by sex and drugs. Inevitably, given the genre’s range, Handy misses a lot: Classics like West Side Story and Heathers are mentioned only glancingly, horror is skipped, and indie gems like Pump Up the Volume are absent. One ungainly chapter crams together ’90s films Boyz n the Hood, Clueless, and Kids. Yet the book is a well-informed conversation starter that takes an often-maligned genre seriously.
Good, smart, occasionally naughty adolescent fun.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781501181177
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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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