A lively work of social history, full of surprises and memorable characters.
In which the capital of Old Blighty turns polymorphously perverse—and fascinatingly so.
Modern officials in Washington, D.C., or New York with an interest in retiring municipal deficits might take a hint from the London of the Kings George. There, writes architectural historian and TV presenter Cruickshank (The Story of Britain’s Best Buildings, 2003, etc.), around 1750, one in five women was “involved in some manner with the sex industry,” and any of them who kept a room paid ferociously high rents that in turn were taxed to the hilt. Even so, the British government made pennies compared to the pounds the city’s 60,000-plus prostitutes were turning over. Bawdy houses were scattered throughout London but were densely concentrated, perhaps ironically, off Maiden Lane and an area that Cruickshank calls the “sexual highway,” which included not just houses but also dark alleyways and wooded parks. The author uses the lens of sexual commerce to examine class relations and economic history, for the history of prostitution is always a history of the poor have-nots oppressed by a few haves. He examines the popular culture of the day, interpreting a series of William Hogarth prints as windows into attitudes that condemned prostitutes, suggesting “the penalty a harlot was supposed to pay for having lived an immoral life even when—as Hogarth acknowledged—it was really through no fault of her own.” Cruickshank notes that the ever censorious crowd, glad to murder monarchs and picnic at public executions, roundly hated homosexuality but despised sexual bullies even more. The author even makes a few suggestive hints about the book trade, observing that the popularity of Captain Cook’s accounts of voyaging in the South Seas may have been due to their titillating accounts of native sexual practices, which local houses of prostitution did their best to replicate.
A lively work of social history, full of surprises and memorable characters.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-65898-4
Page Count: 672
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2010
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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