A revealing look into the link between an urban disaster and the rise of modern charities.
Sifting for truth in the ashes of a Gilded Age catastrophe.
The 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, in New York’s Greenwich Village, took the lives of 146 garment workers. So devastating was the blaze that it led to workplace safety laws. “What is less well known,” writes historian Conrad-Perez, “is that the fire also provided the definitive spark in the rise and industrialization of modern charity in the United States, a watershed moment that instantly recast a group of wealthy bankers and social elites as experts on social problems.” Conrad-Perez pored over newly released documents, including interviews, confidential reports, and private diaries and correspondence, and he argues that the main driver of this charity effort was The New York Times. Once the “polished voice of New York’s big business merchants and magnates,” he writes, the Times found itself “inside the story” after the fire. “As New Yorkers looked for culprits in the greatest tragedy the city had ever experienced…the Times responded with a pivot. It urged the city to put aside blame and give—to a small, hand-picked group of charities, the ones governed by the same families who filled its society pages.” This pivot, the author asserts, marked “the most formative moment in the history of modern charity” but also prompted restrictive anti-immigration laws and mass deportation campaigns that began in the late 1910s and “still echo in the twenty-first-century rhetoric and actions of Donald Trump’s first and second presidential campaigns and terms.” At the heart of the book is a gripping inquiry into what transpired in the aftershocks of a great tragedy.
A revealing look into the link between an urban disaster and the rise of modern charities.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2026
ISBN: 9781479837700
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Washington Mews/New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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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