May find an audience with Beltway groupies but not much more.
Something gets lost in this analog “translation,” as Chicago-based artist Schatz calls this book, of his monumental digital work in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, which goes on display in December 2012. Schatz has assembled what he calls “generative video portraits” of 89 of the nation’s—and primarily Washington, D.C.’s—most powerful people. The subjects are from politics, primarily, but also business, technology, philanthropy and the media. The list includes dozens of well-known movers and shakers—Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, Grover Norquist, David Gergen, Cokie Roberts, Karl Rove, etc.—but also many who are not as known outside their particular fields but are nevertheless part of “the network” at the center of national power. Using multiple cameras, Schatz’s studio reassembled the video he shot in Washington to create complex, painterly and collagelike images of his subjects speaking to his questions (which don’t appear in video or in print). Stills from the video appear alongside the edited text of the interviews in the book, which run one directly after the other with minimal white space between them. Each interview begins with a called-out declaration of name and position (“I’m Jim Leach. I’m the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities”) followed by a straightforward personal history and explanation of how the subject came to his or her current job, as well as reflections on the current state of affairs, most guardedly optimistic. The juxtaposition of these interesting but not earth-shattering narratives with the strange, sometimes ghostly images of their authors is jarring, and it’s difficult to discern if the artist intended to flatter his powerful subjects or present a critique of them that can only be experienced in the digital format.
May find an audience with Beltway groupies but not much more.Pub Date: Dec. 11, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-58834-335-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Smithsonian Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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 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
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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