Do we care if a professionally successful person is a psychological mess? Not, it seems, if we get out of it a great...
Kendall (Associate Fellow/Trumbull College, Yale Univ.; The Forgotten Founding Father: Noah Webster’s Obsession and the Creation of an American Culture, 2010, etc.) returns with a collection of minibiographies of obsessive personalities who transformed American life.
The author begins with Steve Jobs (whom he calls “a tad mad”), then moves on to some other “fragmented individuals” to see where they came from, how they functioned and how they contributed. And what a motley crew: Thomas Jefferson, Henry Heinz, Melvil Dewey, Alfred Kinsey, Charles Lindbergh, Estée Lauder and Ted Williams. Kendall immediately notes the difference between obsessive compulsive disorder and obsessive compulsive personality disorder; his subjects are among those with the latter, though the two disorders are “cousins.” Throughout, the author’s diction fluctuates between the clinical and the conversational. Instances of the latter include Kinsey was a “neatnik,” Ted Williams, “an emotional basket case.” Readers will delight in the weirdness that the author has unearthed. Jefferson was an obsessive organizer and tinkerer; Heinz insisted on absolute cleanliness; Dewey was in love with numbers—and with nubile librarians; Kinsey had orgies in his house at Indiana University; Lindbergh had four separate families (several in Germany); Lauder could not keep her hands off people’s faces and was secretive about her background; Ted Williams did well in high school typing class and was guilty of “nonstop nonsensical chatter.” Kendall ends with some conventional comments about how we should admire what’s admirable about these folks—and that America has benefitted and will benefit from the obsessives among us. Based on the evidence here? Probably not a good idea to marry one.
Do we care if a professionally successful person is a psychological mess? Not, it seems, if we get out of it a great smartphone or a well-organized library. Kendall delivers a mostly engaging history of a handful of America’s “obsessive innovators.”Pub Date: June 25, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4555-0238-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
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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