A history of New York City as varied as the metropolis itself, focusing on the immigrants who throughout the centuries have harkened to America's call and remade New York in their own image. Historians Binder (College of Staten Island, CUNY; The Age of the Common School, 1974) and Reimer (New York Univ.; Still the Golden Door, 1985, etc.) trace New York from its earliest beginnings as a Dutch colony in the 1600s, when it was America's major port, to its present-day status as cultural mecca of the world. Nowhere has the vast diversity of the American populace been more in evidence than in New York City, assert the authors: The first and often final stop of Irish, German, and Jewish immigrants fleeing Europe's poverty and wars, this ragged little island off the Atlantic coast has served as a veritable birth canal for the nation's development. According to Binder and Reimer, New York showed signs of its multiethnic character from the very beginning under the Dutch, who were ``tolerant of religious refugees, ethnic and linguistic minorities, or political exiles.'' Tolerance didn't mean acceptance, but the benign force of early market capitalism, which valued profit above prejudice, insured that religious minorities like Jews and Catholics would be allowed an increasingly larger role in the American franchise. That dynamic, though not always benign, has survived to this day, reemerging during the recent waves of Asian and Caribbean immigration. The authors deftly juxtapose the experiences of various immigrant groups, explaining how a particular culture's mores and idioms aided or hindered its assimilation into American society. What they do not do is bring these powerful cultural, economic, and social forces to life in the everyday experience of individuals, focusing instead on the larger interplay of communities, cultures, and groups. Informative, but a little more human interest would have given color to all those historical and social generalizations.
Pub Date: July 6, 1995
ISBN: 0-231-07878-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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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