This magisterial but unsentimental journey reminds us of what else has been lost at sea.
In too deep.
A sweeping overview of the “anchor-outs” living on abandoned vessels in Richardson Bay, on the outskirts of the wealthy Bay Area city of Sausalito, Kloc’s book unites personal narrative with historical context. A reporter and senior editor at Harper’s magazine, Kloc tells of the denizens of this latter-day Cannery Row who include “retired mariners, single mothers, runaways, addicts, and many others who have caught a bad break from which they haven’t yet recovered.” He is befriended by the self-dubbed “Innate Thought,” a fixture on the scene who uses his “encyclopedic knowledge of American maritime jurisprudence” to help fight the city’s attempts to remove these sailors from the sea. The author eats, drinks, and shares stories but resists the traps of condescension and false familiarity as he paints a portrait of inequities of “Chinatown”-like proportions that date back to the Gold Rush. Befitting Sausalito’s bohemian past, the raffish crew bait the powers that be, reminding them of broken promises to build a homeless shelter. However convivial, the largely white anchor-outs represent an unrepresentative sample, in keeping with Marin County’s history of de facto segregation, relegating Black shipbuilders in World War II to Marin City, a comfortable distance from wealthier neighbors. Their trials, while undeniably real, seem less dire than those of their compatriots in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District and other urban redoubts. But the book fulfills the author’s purpose of documenting this community “when they were under the greatest threat of their one-hundred-year existence. It is the story of what we all stand to destroy when unhoused and low-income communities are allowed to be flattened out of their humanity and…torn apart by ill-considered, profit-driven policies that ask them to pick up and move along, as if, in tearing down camp and scattering in all directions, they have nothing left to lose.”
This magisterial but unsentimental journey reminds us of what else has been lost at sea.Pub Date: April 15, 2025
ISBN: 9780063061699
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 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
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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