An informed if scattershot study of a global good time.
A grand tour of nightlife culture, from medieval Japan to modern raves.
Historian Willetts’ first book has an appealing premise and some surprising insights, the first of which is that the idea of going out at night for fun is a relatively new concept—matters of safety and public morality often proscribed the idea. In the 1650s, the Yoshiwara district of Edo, Japan, was a kind of state-sanctioned party center she describes as an “Orwellian Coachella of feudal Japan.” More often, though, nightspots have been private enterprises. A century later, Vauxhall Gardens in London provided a host of amusements to coax crime-wary citizens from their homes; Montmartre did much the same for Paris at the time. By the 20th century, major cities had established districts for music, dancing, and carousing: Storyville in New Orleans, Lenox Avenue in Harlem, casinos in Las Vegas and Havana. In nearly all cases, nightlife culture was in an awkward dance with moral authorities (who prohibited dancing), police (which cracked down on infamously louche Weimar Berlin), and/or organized crime, which shaped Las Vegas and 1970s New York hotspot Studio 54. From stop to stop, Willetts is an entertaining guide, and she laments how various forces have eroded nightlife. Blame the smartphone: “Our obsession with documentation combined with the knowledge that any misdemeanour could be captured, shared and posted (and worse, go viral) is the death of chaos and spontaneity.” Still, even allowing that the book of this scope will inevitably miss some important places and movements (Vaudeville, Chicago house), the book feels curiously decentered. Willetts offers little in the way of a unifying theme about what makes nightlife valuable, how it has shaped social values, and what might preserve it.
An informed if scattershot study of a global good time.Pub Date: July 14, 2026
ISBN: 9780802167392
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
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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