A readable but peculiar blend of fact and fiction aiming to give a visitors'-eye view of the 1939 New York World's Fair. Gelernter (Computer Science/Yale Univ.; The Muse in the Machine, not reviewed) argues that in exhibits like ``Futurama'' and ``Democracity'' the 1939 fair powerfully expressed a popular vision of what the future would be: a world in which each family owned its own house in a leafy town outside the city, to which Dad commuted for work by car over an enormous highway, while Mom stayed home in a house filled with labor-saving machinery. We lack the 1930s' faith in the future, he claims, because ``in 1970 or so we entered the American utopia'' and found it not quite to our liking. Gelernter hammers home this debatable point with a heavy hand and much repetition, but his theorizing can mostly be ignored in favor of his atmospheric descriptions of the fair itself—from the AT&T building, in which visitors could participate in a demonstration of long-distance phone calling (most exotic in 1939), to Westinghouse's Hall of Electric Living, complete with an automatic dishwasher. The author's generally perceptive analysis of how the fair expressed the 1930s worldview is interspersed with excerpts from a lengthy fictional diary entry recording a day spent at the fair by a young Jewish woman and her fiancÇ. This narrative gives a nice sense of how the fair must have struck contemporary visitors, although even readers who have missed the tiny Author's Note admitting that ``the characters are made up'' will soon realize that the clichÇd drama of Hortense Laura Glassman and Mark Handler is invented. Nothing very new here about a much-covered fair, and the author views the 1930s through glasses so rose-colored, he's practically blind to the decade's harsh realities. But good fun for pop culture aficionados. (author tour)
Pub Date: June 7, 1995
ISBN: 0-02-874002-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
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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