Apportioning just the right attention to each of their stories, Blum weaves a truly memorable frontier tale.
An accomplished storyteller and two-time Pulitzer nominee charts the criss-crossed lives of three remarkable Klondike characters.
By 1898, George Carmack, the prospector who first discovered gold at Bonanza Creek and set off the Yukon gold rush, was looking for a way to transport a quarter-million dollars’ worth of ore from his claim to the stronghold of a boat headed for Seattle; Jefferson “Soapy” Smith, the underworld king of the Skagway, Alaska, boomtown planned on stealing the treasure; Charlie Siringo, an intrepid Pinkerton detective, owed an unusual debt to Carmack and sought to repay it by helping to foil the robbery. By now, fans of Vanity Fair contributing editor Blum (American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century, 2008, etc.) are familiar with his narrative formula: Take a few colorful characters, each a book-worthy subject in his own right and build a story that culminates in their mutual encounter. If the final collision here of the three principals comes as a bit of a letdown, it’s only because following the seemingly predestined paths of each to their Skagway wharf confrontation has been so wildly compelling. A California sheepherder who always dreamed of finding gold, Carmack joined the Marines, learned the Tlingit language and ways, deserted and then returned to Alaska intent on prospecting and fulfilling his mystical destiny. The garrulous Siringo, former shopkeeper and cowboy, signed on with the Pinkertons for adventure and, mourning the death of his wife, went undercover in Juneau to solve the Treadwell mine heist. An outrageous con man, Soapy and his scamming gang had taken over and been run out of a series of Western towns before landing in Skagway. The tumult of the times tosses these three hardened men together—two fleeing warrants, all driven by private demons and outsized dreams—against the backdrop of the last great stampede for gold.
Apportioning just the right attention to each of their stories, Blum weaves a truly memorable frontier tale.Pub Date: April 26, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-46172-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.
Musician, poet and visual artist Smith (Trois, 2008, etc.) chronicles her intense life with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe during the 1960s and ’70s, when both artists came of age in downtown New York.
Both born in 1946, Smith and Mapplethorpe would become widely celebrated—she for merging poetry with rock ’n’ roll in her punk-rock performances, he as the photographer who brought pornography into the realm of art. Upon meeting in the summer of 1967, they were hungry, lonely and gifted youths struggling to find their way and their art. Smith, a gangly loser and college dropout, had attended Bible school in New Jersey where she took solace in the poetry of Rimbaud. Mapplethorpe, a former altar boy turned LSD user, had grown up in middle-class Long Island. Writing with wonderful immediacy, Smith tells the affecting story of their entwined young lives as lovers, friends and muses to one another. Eating day-old bread and stew in dumpy East Village apartments, they forged fierce bonds as soul mates who were at their happiest when working together. To make money Smith clerked in bookstores, and Mapplethorpe hustled on 42nd Street. The author colorfully evokes their days at the shabbily elegant Hotel Chelsea, late nights at Max’s Kansas City and their growth and early celebrity as artists, with Smith winning initial serious attention at a St. Mark’s Poetry Project reading and Mapplethorpe attracting lovers and patrons who catapulted him into the arms of high society. The book abounds with stories about friends, including Allen Ginsberg, Janis Joplin, William Burroughs, Sam Shepard, Gregory Corso and other luminaries, and it reveals Smith’s affection for the city—the “gritty innocence” of the couple’s beloved Coney Island, the “open atmosphere” and “simple freedom” of Washington Square. Despite separations, the duo remained friends until Mapplethorpe’s death in 1989. “Nobody sees as we do, Patti,” he once told her.
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-621131-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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