Fans of the circuses of old, as well as students of popular culture, will enjoy this look back.
A blow-by-blow account of the rivalry among James Bailey, John Ringling, P.T. Barnum, and other players in the American circus world.
“When entertaining the public, it is best to have an elephant,” said Barnum, who knew a thing or two about wowing the public. Captive elephants were at the center of his extravaganzas, as they were of other circuses until, in 2015, the last of the 19th-century organizations struck the tent after animal rights activists succeeded in delivering the elephants from bondage. That last firm, as popular historian Standiford chronicles, was Ringling Brothers, whose namesakes were long gone. A former rock ’n’ roll entrepreneur named Kenneth Feld now headed the company, his head stocked with hard data on every playable venue on the continent. Bailey, whose rival circus was pleasing audiences in the late 19th century, made headlines when an elephant in his troupe gave birth, “the calf described as the first ever born in captivity in the United States.” Barnum offered “the then-astronomical sum of $100,000 for the calf; when Bailey refused, his admiring rival offered a partnership instead, giving birth to what would become the Barnum and Bailey consortium. Standiford is a capable ringmaster over a complicated tale with many moving parts. As he notes, getting a circus before the public required “the seamless integration of five business endeavors running side by side,” from railroads to hotels to “the entertainment business itself, the only one of which produced any income.” Standiford’s narrative lacks the intellectual heft of Louis S. Warren’s Buffalo Bill’s America (2005) as a study of evolving tastes in popular pastimes, but he tells a good story all the same and with a sobering moral: The circus probably wouldn’t survive today now that, as one scholar puts it, “the trend in technology in recent years has been to push individuals into greater and greater electronic isolation.”
Fans of the circuses of old, as well as students of popular culture, will enjoy this look back.Pub Date: June 15, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5417-6228-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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