Effectively shows how the relative liberalism of the Roaring ’20s collided with a lingering Victorian moral code.
In this debut nonfiction work, Stewart investigates the circumstances surrounding the murder of a 20-year-old dancer in Jazz Age Southern California.
Frieda “Fritzie” Mann didn’t get to experience much of the Roaring ’20s. In January 1923, the 20-year-old dancer was found dead on Torrey Pines State Beach a few miles north of San Diego. The case isn’t as well known as other contemporaneous Hollywood-connected scandals, like silent film star’s Fatty Arbuckle’s arrest. Stewart uses trial transcripts, newspaper articles, and other primary sources to bring Mann—and the rapidly changing times in which she lived—alive in a fast-paced, thoughtful true-crime work that contextualizes the dancer’s demise within the sociocultural climate of Prohibition-era America. “The story of Fritzie’s tragic death was much more than an intriguing Jazz Age murder mystery; in many ways, it defined one of the most fascinating eras in U.S. history,” he writes. At the time, Stewart reports, San Diego was “a backwater and Fritzie Mann wasn’t famous,” but in an age of yellow journalism that would make today’s tabloids blanch, the media pounced on the case. Mann was the “right kind of victim, not just a young white woman, but a beautiful exotic dancer washed up dead in her teddies, who cavorted with Hollywood players and enjoyed assignations at beach cottages and got pregnant out of wedlock.” Louis Jacobs, a physician in the U.S. Public Health Service who had been dating Mann, was charged with the murder. He was acquitted after a trial in which the prosecution theorized that he killed Mann while attempting to perform an abortion on her in a beachside cottage. Stewart ably depicts how the case reflects “the status of women in a changing—and unchanging—society” in which, “despite the apparent wave of liberalism and sexual freedom, the Victorian era moral code and associated laws lingered.” Those laws included an almost complete ban on abortions, driving women to extremes to terminate their pregnancies. As America lurches toward overturning Roe v. Wade, Fritzie Mann’s death carries a haunting resonance.
Effectively shows how the relative liberalism of the Roaring ’20s collided with a lingering Victorian moral code.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-952225-78-9
Page Count: 302
Publisher: WildBlue Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
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