A lavishly illustrated book brings a famous photo into sharp historical focus.
The story behind an iconic American photograph.
Rockefeller Center archivist Roussel is well situated to explore the famous photograph “Lunch on a Beam” as a work of art, a work of commerce, and as strategic, impassioned propaganda. On September 20, 1932, a photo was taken of 11 ironworkers on an I-beam smoking, talking, and eating 850 feet above Rockefeller Center, with New York City spread out below. Also known as Lunch Atop a Skyscraper, the photo first ran in the New York Herald Tribune. Roussel feels it is “among the most famous photographs ever made.” The center was designed by a committee of architects and financed by John D. Rockefeller Jr. at 30 Rockefeller Plaza on Sixth Avenue. In the spring of 1930, during the Depression, buildings were purchased and torn down, providing work for thousands. In January 1932 construction of the RCA Building began. When the building had a topping-out ceremony in September 1932, many photos were taken, including the famous choreographed beam photo by, Roussel conjectures, photographer Charlie Ebbets. Rockefeller liked the idea of art and decoration in the center, especially sculptures and murals done by outstanding artists. It would reflect his own social and spiritual values. An exception was a mural by Diego Rivera, featuring Lenin, which was destroyed. The author describes dangerous jobs undertaken by workers, especially the ironworkers who molded 75,000 tons of structural steel. Some fell to their deaths. Roussell reveals that another photo was taken with the 11 men holding out their hats. She details her extensive research trying to identify the men, including insightful profiles of a number of mostly immigrant, Mohawk, and Kahnawake ironworkers and interviews with relatives who provide enticing information. Sadly, she notes, Black workers are missing from the story because unions did not admit them.
A lavishly illustrated book brings a famous photo into sharp historical focus.Pub Date: today
ISBN: 9781684583041
Page Count: 222
Publisher: Brandeis Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 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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