A bleak but beautiful observance of past progress.
Concrete behemoths haunt rural landscapes.
Coaling towers, the subject of this mesmerizing, eerie photo essay, once functioned as coal storage containers for steam engines, hovering high above train tracks, positioned so that trains could pause to receive fuel beneath them. In the early part of the 20th century, newly developed architectural techniques allowed for these towers, previously built from fragile, flammable wood, to be more sturdily crafted out of concrete reinforced with steel. By the 1950s, however, these impressively permanent structures fell into disuse, as diesel trains supplanted coal entirely. Often remotely situated, they were left to age and decay beside farms, amid forests, and on the edges of small towns. Photographer Brouws made an impressive pilgrimage of sorts over the course of five years, traveling around the United States and Canada to capture documentary images of approximately 100 still-standing towers. In “Typology,” the first section of this collection, Brouws focuses his camera on the curious shapes of long-dormant towers. Some resemble grain silos; others look like barns lifted aloft, by turns spindly, portly, and occasionally wildly lopsided, like something built out of blocks by a toddler at play. A second section, “Typographies,” moves the lens out a bit further, placing coaling towers in situ—some still reside, disused, above active train lines; others fade quietly into copses of trees. A few are so awesomely decrepit and odd that they almost seem alive, wobbling like Baba Yaga’s house on shaky chicken legs. Brouws’ work here is informed by typology theory and the New Topographics movement, which is broadly fascinated with the relics of decaying Americana, but this book also serves, more widely, as a meditative mirror to readers. What happens to what is forgotten? How do we decode what lies in disuse?
A bleak but beautiful observance of past progress.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2026
ISBN: 9780262051750
Page Count: 216
Publisher: MIT Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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
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