Students of an ever changing Gotham will take pleasure in Bird’s well-researched narrative.
A native New Yorker recounts the history of the city by way of a microcosmic block.
“Bordered by Twenty-third Street to the south, Twenty-fourth Street to the north, Sixth Avenue to the west, and Fifth Avenue and Broadway to the east, the block once lay far north of the settled city, then at its epicenter, and then on its cultural periphery once again,” writes Bird in the preface. At the center of this urban world stood a hotel that was the scene of political glad-handing, deal-making, prostitution, and other such activities. Perhaps the most famous of the characters inhabiting these pages is the doomed architect Stanford White, gunned down during an affair with a woman whose husband suspected him of “blackballing him from New York’s elite clubs.” The woman in question slipped away into the shadows of the demimonde, at first commanding the tabloids for her “drunken brawls, arrests, evictions, unpaid bills, suspected abortions,” and then largely falling into oblivion. Other of Bird’s subjects are better-heeled, including Marietta Stevens, a social climber who amassed a fortune sufficient to have made her the model for Mrs. Lemuel Struthers in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. She owned much of the aforementioned hotel and plenty of other chunks of downtown, having acquired through various means a treasury of about $86 million in today’s dollars, albeit mostly administered through a trust. Stevens made enough of a stir in life that “at a time when few newspapers ran obituaries for women, all the major New York papers ran one for Marietta, a testament to her hard-earned social status.” Not so for the grifters, drifters, and other lowlier denizens of the block. Bird offers a lively account packed with memorable NYC characters, though it’s less useful in sussing out the tribes of modern New York and a touch less well written than Ada Calhoun’s St. Mark’s Is Dead, based on a similar conceit.
Students of an ever changing Gotham will take pleasure in Bird’s well-researched narrative.Pub Date: March 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63286-742-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
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
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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