Excellent fifth volume in the Everyday Life in America series (Victorian America, by Thomas J. Schlereth, 1991, etc.). Green (History/Northeastern Univ.; The Light of the Home, 1983, etc.) digs into the Crash and the rise of FDR; types of employment; houses and homes in suburb, city, and on the farm; mating, and bearing and raising children; aging and dying; religion; food and cooking; radio, movies, and reading; and leisure time and sports. Despite the new social freedom of the Jazz Age, he says, for farmers, facing falling farm prices, ``the sound of the Roaring Twenties was the howl of the wolf at the door.'' From Emily Post's Etiquette (1915) through Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People (1935), Americans were flooded with guides to behavior and personality growth, while the KKK and bigotry got a massive boost from D.W. Griffith's epic The Birth of a Nation (1915). White-collar jobs grew vastly and WW II allowed women into factories, briefly, and into noncombat military service. Food preparation and storage brought new items to store shelves (factory-made biscuits, quick cereals, frozen foods), while city folk thought bland white bread ``more consistent in texture and easier to store than `immigrant' fare,'' though no foreign-born woman ``would be caught dead with store bread.'' An electrical revolution in household appliances exploded with vacuum cleaners, sewing machines, washing machines, and refrigerators—though most urban homes still had ice delivered until after WW II. Green's liveliest point is that, ``by affirming a special sanitized vision of their nation as a chosen people in a chosen land, Americans unwittingly set a standard for behavior that the people of the present could not attain....'' They assumed that ``history would stop.'' Very special, perhaps the most vital book in this valuable series. (Forty pages of b&w photos—not seen.)
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1992
ISBN: 0-06-016296-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1992
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
