That cloudless rarity, a book that you hope will never end. Matthau tells of life with her two best friends, millionairess Gloria Vanderbilt and Oona O'Neill, daughter of Eugene O'Neill and wife of Charlie Chaplin; of her marriages to William Saroyan and Walter Matthau; and of her lifelong friendship with Truman Capote. All that could make this simply a superior memoir. But something at once concrete and cloud-borne in Matthau's voice binds the reader to the sheer openness of her feelings—and the honesty of her lies. Her childhood: an illegitimate birth, foster homes, and then sudden wealth when her mother marries a pioneer in aviation. Carol, Gloria, and Oona form a honey-faced trio of beauties who come at you like walking cupcakes. Gloria is the poor little rich girl who marries aged conductor Leopold Stokowski, later loses all her money, then goes into business franchising her name and makes more than she inherited. Oona, 18, marries Chaplin, 52, raises a huge brood, then dies of ``a broken heart'' (drink, really) after Chaplin's death. Matthau marries Saroyan twice, finds herself chained to a sick gambler and rotten (not to say insane) tyrant famed for loving humanity. Her third buddy throughout life is Capote, whom she meets when he is on a ladder spying on her in her bath. Then she meets another sick gambler—mordant, married Walter Matthau—and has a four-year affair with him. The lovers' dialogue reaches a grand wittiness, with Walter ready to bet away the ground under Carol's feet. Life with Walter is a masterpiece of pain and laughter, underwritten by Carol's own lingering, near-fatal illness. Time will blunt its shears on this triple-resistant book. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: June 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-394-58266-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1992
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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