A little more storytelling and reporting might have made this an even more compelling narrative, but this is an incisive and...
A brief, cogent analysis of gentrification in Chicago.
As a journalist on urban issues with a Harvard degree in government and a master’s in public policy from the University of Chicago, Hertz clearly knows this territory, and he ably translates matters of public policy into laymen’s terms. He shows how Chicago—and, by extension, other cities—experienced profound transformation before the “white flight” to suburbia in the 1950s and ’60s and how zoning, redlining, and other actions affected what areas were developed. In a city of segregated neighborhoods, the author clearly demonstrates that race has always been an issue, even in neighborhoods as proud of their liberal progressivism as Lincoln Park. Even Chicagoans will be surprised to learn that, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, Lincoln Park “ranked sixtieth out of the city’s seventy-five neighborhoods” in terms of residents’ incomes. There was of “slum clearance,” as those who could afford it moved to suburbia. Yet “at the same time, a small but growing movement of white professionals viewed Lincoln Park as a gem waiting to be polished and reclaimed.” That set the stage for the titular battle, as rehabbers and urban-renewal investors transformed what had once been an area of beaten-down apartment buildings into single-family dwellings that lowered the population density of the neighborhood, and its diversity as well, while attracting higher-income residents. The proximity to downtown, the Gold Coast and the lake, as well as the neighborhood’s namesake park established it as an inviting alternative to suburban life. It also pitted the rehabbers and newcomers against those who had lived there longer and felt they had more authority and legitimacy. By the 1970s, the battle had shifted in tone, with the more militant Young Lords at odds with those they considered carpetbaggers. And what happened in Lincoln Park has subsequently been transforming adjacent neighborhoods in every direction.
A little more storytelling and reporting might have made this an even more compelling narrative, but this is an incisive and useful narrative on the puzzle of urban development.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-948742-09-2
Page Count: 172
Publisher: Belt Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2018
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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