A lively, immersive sojourn through the old capital of Massachusetts.
Revolutionary Boston gets an engaging rogue’s tour.
After a lengthy introduction that covers the period from 1760 to the summer of 1776, author Dickey (Empire of Mud, 2014) starts his tour on July 4 at Long Wharf and ventures into each storied neighborhood of provincial Boston. What begins as a capsule history becomes a comprehensive Rick Steves-like travel guide—with its own wicked sense of place—culminating in the sort of practical advice travelers could use during an 18th-century visit. Dickey strolls from the North End and Harborside to the town center, the Common, the South and West Ends, and beyond to give the reader a sense of the city’s layout. He explores the rowdy taverns, famous assembly halls, secret meeting places, bookshops, brothels, and scenes of disease, destruction, and rebirth. Along the way we meet Whigs and Tories, smugglers and insurgents, agitators and clergy, as well as citizen soldiers, and we learn of key battles and setbacks. Of course, the author also focuses on all the most renowned local players in the drama of revolt, from John Hancock and Paul Revere to John and Abigail Adams. Dickey crams three books’ worth of facts, reflections, and anecdotes into 320 well-paced, colorful pages, illustrated by a wealth of street maps, period engravings, and other artwork. He also touches on the surprising persistence of Puritan attitudes that set the town apart from the cultures of its New York and Philadelphia brethren. As a coda, the author celebrates his cheeky “250th anniversary edition” of the book by contrasting Boston circa 1776 with the current, cosmopolitan incarnation, locating the two-dozen tourist sites and structures that survive.
A lively, immersive sojourn through the old capital of Massachusetts.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2026
ISBN: 9798895150177
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Diversion Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
