A spirited look at the business and impact of delivering mail.
How America got mail.
In his lively debut history, journalist Leonard, a staff writer at Bloomberg Businessweek, chronicles the evolution of the nation’s postal service through the many colorful, sometimes eccentric, personalities that shaped it. The author begins with Benjamin Franklin, who served under the British crown, overseeing postal service finances from London. After the Revolution, Franklin became the first postmaster general, a job he quickly left to become America’s ambassador to France. Nevertheless, Franklin and George Washington shared the conviction that the postal service could “be a force that promoted enlightenment, circulating newspapers and political documents that would guard the public from tyrants and demagogues spreading misinformation.” In addition, mail delivery could create a sense of connection among distant towns in the growing nation. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited in 1831, he praised the postal service as “the great link between minds.” Although there were more than 20,000 miles of post roads by the turn of the 19th century, the cost of sending letters was high, and many communities were not served, spurring competition. Henry Wells, the founder of Wells Fargo, began a delivery company in 1841; for 18 months, the Pony Express—later celebrated and romanticized—offered delivery, on horseback, in California. Free home delivery began in 1861, a much-applauded innovation, although during Arthur Comstock’s long reign as special postal inspector, the content of those deliveries was subject to investigation for obscenity. Philadelphia department store owner John Wanamaker emerges as a hero, pushing for reforms such as rural free delivery and parcel post. It was so cheap to send a package that some parents affixed stamps to their children for delivery to relatives rather than buy train tickets. Air mail, the rise of unions, financial troubles, zip codes, and the phenomenon of “going postal” are all subjects of Leonard’s brisk, informative narrative.
A spirited look at the business and impact of delivering mail.Pub Date: May 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2458-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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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