Anderson provides plenty of fodder for academic audiences.
An exuberant tour of cities, real and imaginary, far and wide.
An epigraph from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities—“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears…everything conceals something else”—sets the stage for Scotland-based Irish writer Anderson’s (Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson, 2013, etc.) “diminished non-fiction mirror” of Calvino’s book. Though Anderson lacks the Italian master’s poetic style, he makes up for it with energy and learning. He notes that a history of “ever-changing cities, whether real or unreal, must also be a history of the imagination.” Anderson’s approach owes much to the psychogeography school of thought and the seminal works of Borges and W.G. Sebald and recent writers like Iain Sinclair and Will Self. Rather than walk his cities, Anderson draws upon a postmodernist mashup of history, literature, film, art, philosophy, architecture, video games, and pop culture to weave in and out of them. A distant cousin to Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Anderson’s idiosyncratic and loosely organized compendium is filled to the brim with quotes and references. He opens with Marco Polo and his tales of the many cities he visited, real and fanciful. Then it’s off to Coleridge and his laudanum-infused city of Xanadu. Anderson then quickly infuses his commentary with Homer, engraver Theorodor de Brys, and poet Comte de Lautréamont by way of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Then comes Goya, De Quincey, and Doré, all in the space of three pages. Written in an aphoristic, epigrammatic style, Anderson’s cascade of language and sources borders on the rambling. His discussions about cities and how they have been created and explored in history and myth become hard to follow. There’s much to admire here, but the sheer mass of information—and hundreds of footnotes, many quite fascinating (“the subliminal sense of unease towards pleasure parks is evident in the ease with which it is turned into dystopia—Westworld, The Prisoner, Eurobosch, Tommy’s Holiday Camp”)—often overwhelms.
Anderson provides plenty of fodder for academic audiences.Pub Date: April 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-226-47030-6
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
