Powerful exploration of underexamined relationships between labor, culture, and the urban future.
Original, engrossing discussion of emerging class, race, and gender transformations in post-industrial urban America.
Rotella (English/Boston Coll.) utilizes unorthodox structure and focus to good effect here; this consists of long essays on four unique urban environments and a particular subculture within each, creating a greater portrait of American cities on the cusp of change. He is sympathetic to the information-age dilemmas of the working class, writing about “sure-handed characters who . . . make culture, a form of work in itself.” He utilizes this idea of cultural production to explore the historical environments enveloping his central figures. In Erie, Pennsylvania, he writes about the ascent of Liz McGonigal, a “compact and graceful” champion in amateur woman’s boxing, exploring both this sport’s strange collision of aggressive athleticism and sexual archetypes and the Erie boxing scene’s connection to the town’s hard-bitten industrial tradition (itself down but not out). The most engaging section focuses on Chicago guitarist Buddy Guy, who in his 50-year career has witnessed and profited from the blues’ transformation from an entertainment of and for the city’s African-American South Side into a valued tool of civic boosterism consumed by mostly white blues-rock enthusiasts. Rotella’s most unusual ideas develop in considering two eccentric New York City detectives whose work during the “urban crisis” (c. 1965–70) influenced The French Connection and numerous other films and TV shows, essentially creating the post-1970 cultural idea of crime and the underclass. Equally thought-provoking is his closing chapter on the clash in Brockton, Massachusetts, between landscape artist Patricia Johanson, who purchased native son Rocky Marciano’s decaying house as part of a project to honor him, and the city’s political establishment, which cooled on Johanson’s proposal for reasons including their wish to attract high-tech investment. Although Rotella sometimes reverts to the abstracted terminology of cultural-studies journals, serious readers will appreciate his enthusiasm, sharp observations, and the overall narrative’s meandering wit.
Powerful exploration of underexamined relationships between labor, culture, and the urban future.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-520-22562-7
Page Count: 293
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
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
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