An entertaining and informative history of an unlikely subject.
The San Francisco Chronicle’s pop culture critic engagingly charts the rise of blue jeans from humble laborers’ togs to haute couture.
The familiar tale that Levi Strauss created these sturdy pants for miners during the California Gold Rush turns out to be an oversimplification. Sullivan explains that Nevada tailor Jacob Davis actually came up with blue jeans after a woodcutter’s wife came to him complaining that she couldn’t find trousers that stayed together at the seams. But Davis didn’t have the money to apply for a patent, so he partnered with Strauss, and before long his creations were the pants of choice for miners, loggers and cowboys. WWII helped create a market among the fairer sex. Women who went to work in factories took to wearing denim overalls, and even women who stayed home began to appreciate the material: For the upper-crust housewives who lost their domestic help to the war effort, Claire McCardell designed a denim housecoat with an attached oven mitt. In the 1950s, Hollywood bad boys embraced jeans (James Dean wore them in Rebel Without a Cause), and when teenagers adopted the pants, parents worried about a link between denim and delinquency. But by the beginning of the 21st century, jeans signified consumerism, not rebellion; shoppers at expensive New York boutiques could easily pay $200 for a pair of not-so-plain dungarees. The history-of-everyday-things genre sometimes strains credulity—does the story of salt really explain the rise and fall of the Roman Empire?—but Sullivan has pulled it off, showing that in blue jeans, we can see the history of work, leisure and gender roles in 20th-century America. Wonderfully chosen photos, such as a Life magazine shot of 1950s college girls slumming in baggy blue jeans, nicely complement the text.
An entertaining and informative history of an unlikely subject.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-592-40214-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2006
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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