An affectionately curated assortment of tales about human ingenuity saved from the dustbin of history.
The former Talking Heads frontman on great art and ideas that missed their moment.
In academic literature, a “sleeping beauty” is a research paper that was neglected when it was first published but found relevance later. Pop icon and author Byrne (How Music Works, 2012, etc.) expands the concept by looking for examples not just in science but in literature, music, technology, economics, and more. Though the book is structured as 35 brief histories and biographies, he organizes them around a handful of themes. Sometimes all an artist needs is one spirited advocate (like William Faulkner had in Malcolm Cowley); sometimes a figure needs time to escape their reputation (like the infamously pugnacious Caravaggio); sometimes research needs to catch up with a rejected idea (like continental drift); or sometimes a catastrophe demonstrates an idea’s validity (as financial collapses redeemed the research of neglected economist Hyman Minsky). If music doesn’t pan out for Byrne, he has a viable sideline as a pop-history writer—he has a wry, entertaining, and informed voice whether he’s discussing Vermeer’s paintings or water-management systems in ancient India. His enthusiasm for the subject is consistent throughout, though too often he gooses his prose with exclamation. (“Even the Bard did sequels!...There’s a lot you can do with one chord!...Never underestimate how one might be discovered!”) There’s little autobiographical material here, though an opening chapter about his discovery of the neglected Brazilian musician Tom Zé speaks to his passion, and he plainly did all this homework in the name of boosting creativity. The closing pages advocate for a cosmopolitan, open-minded view of the world that might save good ideas from lying dormant for years, even centuries.
An affectionately curated assortment of tales about human ingenuity saved from the dustbin of history.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9780593655276
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
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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