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WORKING AT PLAY

A HISTORY OF VACATIONS IN THE UNITED STATES

An interesting if somewhat academic social history of the American vacation that examines the tension between the American work ethic and the concept of leisure. Aron, a University of Virginia historian, explores the development of the American vacation from the early 19th century to WWII. Prior to 1865, vacations were taken exclusively by the wealthy and justified for health reasons. A doctor might recommend a stay at the seashore or a mineral spring for restoring health: “change of air . . . could, some physicians felt, mitigate or even cure some diseases, among them consumption, asthma, gout, and rheumatism.” Places with clean air and mineral water, such as Saratoga Springs (N.Y.), Hot Springs (Va.), and Newport (R.I.), became meccas for 19th-century American vacationers. To entice more visitors, these “restorative” resorts began offering various amusements like billiards, bowling, gambling, dances, and concerts. With their wealthy clientele and leisurely amusements, these “fashionable” resorts became centers of gossip and dissolution, according to the popular press. Meanwhile, religious leaders condemned the decadence of these resorts while setting up religious retreats and campsites. At Chautauqua, N.Y., a Methodist minister established a resort for training Sunday school teachers. These religiously motivated resorts typically restricted alcohol, smoking, dancing, and flirting. The Chautauqua model of vacation resorts dedicated to sober self-improvement was copied all over the nation. After the Civil War, railroads and travel agencies made vacationing easier, cheaper, and widely accessible to the middle class. Wary of the idleness and frivolity of fashionable resorts, the middle class turned to camping, touring, chautauquas, and the national parks. In the early 20th century, companies began giving paid vacations to workers as a means of boosting morale and productivity. Long excluded from most resorts, African-Americans and Jews began setting up their own vacation resorts. Alas, the historic tension of which Aron writes between work and fun is evident in her own prose, which is thoroughly scholarly. Readers, like vacationers, want some entertainment, too.

Pub Date: May 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-19-505584-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Oxford Univ.

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1999

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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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 Yorker staff 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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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