A monumental piece of work, stuffed to the gills with both clean and dirty secrets, certain to be de rigueur poolside...
The story of MCA and its unrivaled influence on the culture and business of entertainment under perhaps the most powerful man about whom most Americans know nothing.
Following MCA founder Jules Styne and his band-booking business from Chicago to Hollywood in the mid-1920s, New Yorker staff writer Bruck (The Predators’ Ball, 1988, etc.) shapes the conduit opened between Tinseltown and Styne’s sub-rosa associates, the Chicago mob. Roots on the rough side would make MCA “too aggressive, too smart, and too street-wise” for most contenders in years to come, she notes. But it was the hiring 12 years later of a former Cleveland movie usher named Lou (later self-amended to Lew) Wasserman that put what was by then a multitalent agency on the road to forging Hollywood history and, for decades, uncontested dominion. Who knew there were so many deals of the century? But Wasserman sat in on them all: breaking the back of the old studio-mogul empire by getting Jimmy Stewart the first star’s piece-of-the-action deal from a house that didn’t have cash up front; turning MCA into a production outfit that rushed in to “save” nascent TV networks then, in no time, dictating entire program lineups. He did business with presidents too: Lew dined intimately with LBJ at the White House; in 1950 he had turned to his client and Screen Actors Guild president Ronald Reagan to push a touchy labor situation MCA’s way, then, 30 years later, just as handily got “Ronnie,” as US President, to call off the FCC, a supposedly independent agency, from enforcing nonsyndication rules against TV production firms. Eulogies in June 2002, proclaiming him a pillar of strength, wisdom, and integrity, Bruck avers, skirted a broader truth.
A monumental piece of work, stuffed to the gills with both clean and dirty secrets, certain to be de rigueur poolside reading in Beverly Hills this summer.Pub Date: June 10, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-50168-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
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
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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