A delightful time capsule, skillfully unpacked.
With the Great Depression subsiding and Europe headed for war, New York City threw a party. It didn’t go well.
The theme of the 1939 World’s Fair was “The World of Tomorrow.” Plagued by ferocious rain storms, withering heat waves, labor disputes, power outages, lower-than-expected attendance and weak revenues, the fair’s glittering vision of the future nevertheless managed to amaze most of its 45 million attendees, even as they nervously consumed the news from overseas. Recounting the exposition’s wonders and woes, former Cosmopolitan executive editor Mauro spices his story with tales of visiting presidents, kings, queens, politicians, sports heroes and movie stars. He wonderfully elaborates on the fair’s movers and shakers: feisty Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, imperious and scheming Parks Commissioner Robert Moses and businessman Harvey Gibson, whose feckless application of “homey touches” to the proceedings embarrassed the city’s official greeter and fair president, the pretentious and beleaguered Grover Whalen. Demonstrating how real-world events intruded upon the fair’s assertions of sweetness and light, Mauro follows the careers of two policemen killed removing a bomb from the British Pavilion, and he tracks the activities of Albert Einstein, a three-time Fair visitor. Voluntarily in exile from Germany, the physicist abandoned his well-known pacifism, authoring a letter to Franklin Roosevelt warning about Hitler’s atomic-bomb program, a notification that eventually inspired the Manhattan Project. Before the end of the fair’s first season, many of the countries represented on its grounds were at war. Mauro’s story will likely appeal to fans of Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City (2003), but readers should know that the crime element plays less heavily here.
A delightful time capsule, skillfully unpacked.Pub Date: July 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-345-51214-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2010
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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