The fifth volume in Starr's grand and wide-ranging history of California (Endangered Dreams, 1995, etc.). Drawing on a wealth of sources, the author offers a panoramic account of the Golden State during the turning-point years before America's entry into WW II. While he first surveys communities (Big Sur, Carmel, Palm Springs, Pasadena, et al.) whose affluent lifestyles not only survived the Depression but also set the pace for the rest of the country, Starr moves on to profile the West Coast's academic enclaves (Berkeley, Palo Alto, Westwood) and great cities (Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco). Covered as well are those who contributed to California's rich cultural heritage in literature (Cain, Chandler, Hammett, and West, to name but a few), painting (notably, the federally subsidized muralists who recorded the past of ``the state with a Mexican accent''), and photography (Ansel Adams, Edward Weston). Not too surprisingly, Starr devotes considerable attention to Hollywood and how its studio system marshaled the artistic resources of a generation to help America (and the wider world) through hard times. In an engrossing chapter felicitously titled ``Ich Bin ein Sñdkalifornier,'' he recounts how the rise of the Third Reich induced scores of German actors, composers, writers, and other intellectuals to seek refuge from Nazi oppression in filmdom's capital, where they promptly and thoroughly Europeanized the motion-picture industry. Using this productive context as a departure point, the author closes with a somber assessment of the ways in which California's ÇmigrÇ communities dealt with a global outbreak of anti-Semitism and (with fellow exile Leon Feuchtwanger) pondered whether Jewish civilization could reconstitute itself. A penetrating addition to an altogether splendid series, which (thanks to the broad appeal of its subject matter and period) could prove a breakout book.
Pub Date: April 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-19-510079-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1997
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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