A wicked good read about music and baseball and a city that’s wild about both.
The story of a young record label owner who found a way to cash in on Boston’s rivalry with the New York Yankees.
For decades, more than a few Red Sox fans have filled Fenway Park with the chant “Yankees suck,” a cheerfully vulgar insult directed at their New York opponents. In his fascinating memoir, Wrenn, himself a lifelong BoSox fan, explains, “In Boston, hating the Yankees was just as much a part of a fan’s identity as supporting the Red Sox.” One of Wrenn’s friends decided to cash in on the slogan, joining several other street vendors around Fenway selling shirts emblazoned with the battle cry (such as it is), which gave Wrenn the idea to follow suit in 2000, selling bumper stickers and buttons instead. It didn’t take long for Wrenn’s operation—just him, at the beginning—to bring in serious money, which he had earmarked for Bridge Nine, the hardcore punk record label he founded as a college student. Wrenn kept building his label, which featured bands including American Nightmare, Carry On, and the Hope Conspiracy, at the same time diversifying his merchandise into T-shirts and items with different slogans. His Fenway operation, much like his Red Sox fandom, was not always a smooth ride: Code enforcement officers, rival vendors, and unhappy Boston fans made his job difficult at times, but he persevered, turning his merchandise business (now called Sully’s) and his record label into businesses that are still at it today. The author chronicles his success in merchandising and music with something like a wry disbelief; at no point in this book does the reader get the impression that he is at all impressed with himself. That’s part of what gives this entertaining memoir its considerable charm.
A wicked good read about music and baseball and a city that’s wild about both.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2026
ISBN: 9798894140872
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Running Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 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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