An exceptional work of scholarship about “our relationships to cars and through cars and the stories we tell about those...
With driverless cars on the way, a journalist asks, is America ready to accept them?
One way to begin formulating an answer is to examine the car culture that has defined America since the 1920s, when Henry Ford turned his “missionary zeal for low, low prices” into the country’s first line of affordable automobiles. In his debut book, Albert, who writes about cars for n+1, provides a witty history of the automobile and a look at the future. He takes readers on a fascinating journey covering a lot of ground: the earliest battery-powered electric vehicles of the 1890s; Ford’s first big triumph with the 1909 Model T; Alfred P. Sloan Jr., “the most important CEO in GM’s history,” who introduced car loans in the 1920s to encourage repeat buying; the birth of America’s interstate highway system in the 1950s, “by any measure the largest government project in American history”; and the push for smaller and more environmentally friendly vehicles in the 1960s and ’70s, thanks in part to Ralph Nader. All of this leads to an incisive analysis of the current culture, in which young people would rather call an Uber than own a car, and the question of whether driverless cars really will achieve their promise of fewer accident-related deaths. A late chapter on the author’s auto-repair prowess feels airlifted in from another project, but the narrative is still an entertaining exploration of American vehicle culture and American culture in general. Along the way, Albert can’t resist political jabs, most of them directed at the right, as when he writes, “America First types may be disappointed to learn that it was France that had the first car culture.” He also notes a few facts that may surprise—that supposedly safe SUVs, among the most profitable vehicles on the market, “tip over at twice the rate of cars.”
An exceptional work of scholarship about “our relationships to cars and through cars and the stories we tell about those relationships.”Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-393-29274-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
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 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
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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