A zesty, succinct contextualization of the World Trade Center, its seaminess and semiotics, from novelist and academic Darton (Media Studies/Hunter; Free City, 1996). No matter what you think about the aesthetics of Minoru Yamasaki’s gothic-modernist World Trade Center—a heinous mega-blot on the landscape or a “breakthrough in terms of New York’s architectural trademark,” as Ada Louise Huxtable cooed—the real fascination in the twin monsters lies in the machinations that gave them birth. Darton particularly loves the irony of the Port Authority, protector of the region’s ports and creator of the WTC, engineering the mutation of the center “from a superblock speculation specifically mandated for port and international trade functions into a superblock speculation having almost nothing to do with either.” He sardonically traces the evolution of the downtown landscape from the later 19th century within the context of early zoning laws, urban renewal, the ministerings of the Regional Plan Association, the flimflammery of Austin Tobin as head of the Port Authority, the desire of the Rockefellers to leverage the value of family real estate holdings, and the connivance of the New York Times with the lot of them. Darton reads the WTC from many angles, from Le Corbusier to Gaston Bachelard to Marshall Berman (—two monumental structures whose formal relationship gives no indication of their purpose or intent—), but it is power and money that dominate, the small people be damned along with their shops and neighborhoods. The towers speak the language of wealth and vested interests: “Would a desperate gambit like the World Trade Center have been deemed necessary, or desirable, if the Port Authority had taken reasonable care of the port?” Even time hasn’t seen fit to burnish the World Trade Center’s image. There are just too many skeletons in its many closets, and Darton obligingly opens each one to peek inside.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-465-01701-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1999
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 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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