A breathless account of a Depression-era heat wave, long-forgotten.
Exceptionally hot weather, back when most Americans couldn’t escape it.
Williams, author of C.C. Pyle’s Amazing Foot Race (2007), specializes in oddball niche historical events that are often less amusing the closer they are examined. Our warming planet is breaking heat records, but many that remain unbroken date from 1936, a year whose meteorological quirks often attracted more attention than Hitler. The book opens in January, which turned out to be among the coldest in history, but quickly moves on to an unnaturally warm spring and hellish summer. Beaches were packed, and Williams writes of the era’s legal standards of indecency: Men were ticketed for exposing their upper bodies, and families routinely slept on porches and lawns and in cars, public parks, and movie theaters. Air conditioners (invented in 1902) remained too expensive for Depression-era households. A unit that could cool a room cost $400 (more than $9,000 today) and weighed roughly 600 pounds. Williams summarizes what little scientists knew of Earth’s temperature cycles and the state of cooling technology, but mostly he delivers 65 chronological chapters of what reporters documented: victim after victim suffering and often dying during hot weather. Readers will encounter a steady stream of vivid, usually heartrending anecdotes. Victims grew sick and often collapsed; some crashed their cars, fell off roofs, and killed themselves (and, occasionally, others). Zoo animals escaped, as did monkeys—they were popular pets at the time. The author writes, “If you were a police officer in 1936, pursuing a monkey was practically part of the job description.”
A breathless account of a Depression-era heat wave, long-forgotten.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9798897101252
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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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