An informative and visually striking guide to public art at its most democratic.
This colorful, illustrated catalog showcases scenes from Wisconsin history and daily life that grace Depression-era post offices.
Gates surveys 35 murals commissioned for Wisconsin post offices in the 1930s and ’40s by an unlikely New Deal bureaucracy known as the Treasury Department’s Section of Fine Arts. They are mainly large-scale paintings, in the range of 10 to 15 feet wide by 4 to 6 feet high, depicting local historical lore and economic mainstays in the small towns where they are displayed. (The author also includes gossamer aluminum reliefs of ducks by sculptor Boris Gilbertson, housed in Janesville.) The murals teem with muscular men harvesting cranberries, threshing grain, pitching hay, hauling nets, making cheese, and, above all, felling trees and sawing logs. There are also a few youths sledding and skating and a rare feminine subject in Frances Foy’s enchanting scenes of women and girls picking wildflowers in forest glades, housed at a Milwaukee branch. Historical subjects include French missionaries and explorers, trading meetings between White settlers and Native Americans, and a legendary mass brawl among—naturally—lumberjacks in Park Falls. The purpose of the pieces is staid civic uplift, but the aesthetics and mood are often dramatic: Peter Rotier’s West Bend painting The Rural Mail Carrier, featuring a mailman in a buggy visiting a farmstead, has lowering skies, stark light and shadow, and haunting figures with expressions of grim determination. Gates’ entries include biographical sketches of the artist, a brief profile of the town, and an involved account of the work’s creation and reception. (Most garnered praise from the citizenry, but some faced opposition; one postmaster grumbled that the lobby looked fine the way it was and that “there is nothing of any historical significance” and “no particular industry” in the town for a mural to portray.) The full-color illustrations are sumptuous, and Gates’ lucid, workmanlike prose is studded with intriguing details and commentary by Treasury’s discerning critics that shed light on the processes of art by committee. (“The Section felt that the Indians and horses were drawn in an interesting manner but that the landscapes and the ground on which they stood were not convincing.”) The result is a captivating look at Wisconsin culture that may tempt readers into art tours in out-of-the-way places.
An informative and visually striking guide to public art at its most democratic.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-970088-00-7
Page Count: 178
Publisher: Post Office Fans
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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