Zeitz does create a picture of a United States undergoing a sexual revolution and experiencing urbanization, an expanding...
If the United States became modern in the decade after the First World War, a popular symbol of that modernity is the flapper, a scantily clad, frivolous young woman whose newfound freedom from restrictive clothing represented a way of life free of Victorian social strictures.
Zeitz (American History/Cambridge Univ.), a contributing editor to American Heritage magazine, has undertaken to chronicle the rise and fall of this icon of modernity through the lives of those who exemplified her and those who promoted her. The author devotes considerable space to the life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who is variously credited with inventing her, discovering her and/or exploiting her, as well as to that of his wife Zelda. Also sketched in considerable detail are the lives of the women who portrayed her on the silver screen—Colleen Moore, Clara Bow and Louise Brooks—those who wrote about her—New Yorker columnist Lois Long, among them—and those who drew her—fashion artist Gordon Conway and cartoonist John Held. Also profiled are the fashion designer Coco Chanel, whose designs defined her slender silhouette, and Bruce Barton and Edward Bernays, who used her image to promote the sale of consumer goods. The result is a work that feels unduly padded, stuffed full of extraneous facts. These certainly provide color, but it is not clear what Hemingway’s jealousy of Fitzgerald, the fact that Louise Brooks claimed to have slept with Greta Garbo or that Lois Long typed her columns stripped to her slip have to do with the subject.
Zeitz does create a picture of a United States undergoing a sexual revolution and experiencing urbanization, an expanding consumer culture and a booming economy, but he burdens it with an excess of irrelevant particulars.Pub Date: March 14, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-8053-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2006
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 2025 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.
