Enjoyable history of one of the world’s greatest monuments and some significant surrounding figures.
Popular historian Jonnes (Conquering Gotham: Building Penn Station and Its Tunnels, 2007, etc.) explores the 1889 Paris World’s Fair and its participants.
Her central focus is the remarkable story of the Eiffel Tower, designed by engineer Gustave Eiffel. Made of iron and looming nearly 1,000 feet above the Champ de Mars, the tower was the tallest man-made structure of its time. Eiffel faced many challenges during its construction, including harsh public criticism of the tower’s “soulless vulgarity,” a strike by embittered workers and intense disputes with the Otis Company over delays and cost overruns involving the American-made elevators. The author’s thorough yet pleasantly readable account contains a particularly thrilling description of one journalist’s exhilarating early ascent with the tower’s creator. Surrounding this story is a large cast of notable characters who were involved with the fair to varying degrees, including Buffalo Bill Cody, Paul Gauguin, William Bennett, Vincent Van Gogh, James Whistler, Annie Oakley and Thomas Edison. The interactions among them make for some of the most memorable passages, from Gauguin’s attendance at Buffalo Bill’s Wild West spectacle to the mutual admiration between Edison and Eiffel. The inclusions of Van Gogh and Whistler, while intriguing, are somewhat puzzling as their involvement in the fair was peripheral. Jonnes unearthed many firsthand accounts of these luminaries, and her portraits attach vivid human traits to figures often known mostly from textbooks. The author balances these interactions among individuals with consideration of the connections between the fair’s principal participants, France and the United States. The allied nations were embroiled in a tumultuous love affair, each enamored with the other’s culture but wishing to prove its dominance. The Americans, including Edison, boasted that they would build an even higher structure for the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. It never happened, and the Eiffel Tower remained the world’s tallest edifice for the next 40 years.
Enjoyable history of one of the world’s greatest monuments and some significant surrounding figures.Pub Date: May 4, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-670-02060-7
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
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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