Evocative, entertaining and often suspenseful—sports history at a very high standard.
Timely, illuminating account of the 17th Olympiad, with its many firsts, including the first doping scandal in Olympic history.
Washington Post editor and Pulitzer-winner Maraniss (Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero, 2006, etc.) has a talent for condensing sprawling events into comprehensible episodes. In this instance, those episodes take place on and off the field. Many, indeed, take place in secret government facilities and back alleys. The 1960 Rome games, for instance, took place at the height of the Cold War, when the United States and Soviet Union both took considerable pains to convert a theoretically apolitical contest of amateurs into a thoroughly politicized, near-professional endeavor. As Maraniss’s account opens, for instance, track star Dave Sime is receiving an assignment from Washington to “run for your country, and bag a defector for your country as well.” While other American athletes distributed Russian-language pamphlets extolling the virtues of life in the West, Russian women athletes stepped onto the Rome tarmac wearing “sharp beige suits, hosiery, high-heeled brown pumps—and lipstick,” having been instructed to show the sexist sportswriters of the world that beauty salons were not unknown behind the Iron Curtain. Meanwhile, African-American athletes such as Rafer Johnson—the first to carry the flag in the parade of nations—and Wilma Rudolph struggled to keep their discontents about Jim Crow America to themselves, a matter that seemed not to trouble a young boxer named Cassius Clay, whose consciousness would not be heightened for another few years with the adoption of a new name, Muhammad Ali. As to the firsts: Maraniss carefully relates stories of the first doping scandal in Olympic history, the advent of anabolic steroid use, the inauguration of the Olympics as a television event—and the first recognition on the part of the U.S. government, it seems, that the Soviets had a point in thinking that “some…sporting victories have had certain propaganda benefits.”
Evocative, entertaining and often suspenseful—sports history at a very high standard.Pub Date: July 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-3407-5
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 Yorker staff 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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