I never had that desire to make an honest living, which everyone is supposed to have. I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth and I wanted to keep it there. I didn't think then that I was a spoiled brat, nor did I think, as I did later, that the world owed me a living." Henry Miller, our elder statesman of the libido, celebrates his 84th birthday this month, but by this evidence he is unregenerate. His memoir of his oldest friends continues the autobiographical romance he first published in Paris in the '30's where, he says, he first began to appreciate Brooklyn's glorious 14th Ward. His pals from Brooklyn are sinister angels like himself—tough yet guileless con artists who could charm their way into the habit of a Mother Superior, as cunning Joe O'Reagan claimed to have done. "Writers," according to Henry, get their material "from the gutter, from the potentially insane or criminal." Several wives, whores, girl friends, taxi dancers, bitches cross his path—"cunt was in the air" during his Western Union period—but his tenderness is reserved for his fellow guttersnipes: Stasiu, Johnny Paul, the Imhof brothers, Cousin Henry. All, of course, in the overriding context of his uninhibited monomania: the hero he worships most of all is his mythic self. As well as you think you know him from the Tropics or The Rosy Crucifixion, he's fresh and funny, with the same irresistible picaresque appeal—this old goat who still maintains that even if you love your wife madly, "To fuck someone else [is] a sign of life, the celebration of life." (Last two chapters not available to us at press time.)
Pub Date: Feb. 10, 1975
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Capra
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1975
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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