Despite its unpolished prose, fans of hard-boiled detective novels will enjoy this fascinating bio.
Stang shares the story of his father, who, he claims, inspired the hard-boiled detective in Mickey Spillane’s popular crime novels.
This debut biography opens in 1947 at a bar and grill owned by the author’s father and located on the New York waterfront. A cub reporter narrates, remarking on a casual conversation between two friends—a large, intimidating bartender with piercing eyes, Jack Stang Sr., and crime writer Spillane. The book then flashes back to 1932, when Jack Sr. was 9, and continues chronologically in Jack Sr.’s voice. Growing up, Jack enjoyed life with his parents and two younger brothers; he was popular in school, a football player and a natural leader who protected the weaker kids from bullies. In 1941, while at the family bar, he heard about the bombing of Pearl Harbor on the radio. He decided to quit high school and join the Marines, and his impressive military career spans more than a third of the book. The remainder covers his subsequent career as a policeman, and his occasional forays into Hollywood, where he almost portrays Spillane’s tough-guy detective Mike Hammer on-screen. Stang’s wife and children, including the author, hover around the edges of the story. The author’s breathless, staccato writing style meshes perfectly with the many tense military scenes: “They hit about 5 guys right away—we fired back—rapid fire—Bucky firing off the Browning as fast as he could.” It’s less effective in the other sections, making many events seem hurried and superficial—more like a series of rough sketches or jotted diary notes than a fully rounded biography. The author’s liberal use of tough language feels appropriate to the time and setting, but readers may find it stilted at times (“Me, being the oldest, and I had a way with animals, became her trainer.”) The biography’s ending, in 1952, feels abrupt, although a short afterword adds closure. A rich 45-page treasury of photos and newspaper clippings rounds out the portrait.
Despite its unpolished prose, fans of hard-boiled detective novels will enjoy this fascinating bio.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2012
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 313
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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