A gossipy and rambling history of the legendary hotel, by Morehouse, former cultural critic for The Christian Science Monitor. Home to stars, retired generals, Presidents, and exiled royalty—a fact Morehouse repeats with irritating regularity—the present hotel on Park Avenue is a successor to the one built by William Waldorf Astor on the site of his home on Fifth Avenue. That first Waldorf, opening in 1893, soon became known as the ``mother of hotels''—the place for the rich to stay and New York society to socialize. As the fashionable crowd moved north, so did the hotel, opening in 1931, in the midst of the Depression, on its present site. (The old hotel was torn down and replaced by the Empire State Building.) Morehouse dutifully records all the tons of steel, cubic feet of imported marble, square feet of accommodation space, and costs—in fact, seemingly every bit of information, pertinent or not, that he can find. And in a sequence of confusing chapters, he introduces managers, owners, and employees, as well as gossip about the rich and famous who have stayed in the hotel and its Waldorf Towers suites, which have been home to the likes of Frank Sinatra, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Imelda Marcos, former President Hoover, and Cole Porter. Every illustrious entertainer who used to perform there, like Maurice Chevalier or Jack Benny, is also noted- -often—as are the great banquets and balls, especially the ``April in Paris'' extravaganzas of the 1950's, while no anecdote, however pedestrian, is left unrepeated. Somewhere lost in the muddle is a hotel with a great story still to tell. Less-than-titillating gossip, facts and figures of only passing interest, and a mass of disorganized material make this a book to be mined rather than read.
Pub Date: July 22, 1991
ISBN: 0-87131-663-3
Page Count: 258
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1991
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 Yorker staff 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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