Whatever the topic and mood, these essays are a pleasure—and any work that name-checks the Nightcrawlers’ proto-punk classic...
Love letters to the old, weird New York and the old, weird cultural interests it sustained, by a grand centrifugal chronicler.
Take a piece that Village habitué Sante (The Factory of Facts, 1998, etc.) wrote for the New Yorker, a “Talk of the Town” feature about going out to grab a midnight snack in 1988 and running into a mini riot centered on Tompkins Square Park and its “latter-day Hooverville.” Sante disavows the published version for its introduced constructions (“well nigh,” “I decided to investigate”) and allows that Reaganville is more to the point, but it’s still a brisk report on a New York that has been truncheoned—no, fined—out of existence. Fined? Yes, writes Sante, for the gritty, noisy, beer-on-the-stoop New York of old was quashed during the Giuliani years, when the mayor ordered that tickets be written for every imaginable misdemeanor, including that byword for citizens’ rights, jaywalking. “New York’s transformation,” Sante avers, hinged on “the pedantic obsessiveness with which laws were combed to find a basis for extirpating all manifestations of street life, and the harshly punitive ways in which those sweeps were carried out.” Good-bye Tompkins Square squats, good-bye boarded-up buildings on Canal Street; the new New York wasn’t even tolerant of smoking, a habit, vice or way of being—take your pick—about which Sante writes a long but user-friendly semiotic analysis in which, among other things, he defends the old European custom of holding a ciggie between thumb and forefinger. (You can smoke more that way.) Alas—or hurrah, take your pick—Sante no longer smokes, and neither does the city. Other pieces touch deftly on matters of musical and cultural archaeology, from the origins of the blues to Allen Ginsberg’s turning up at Sante’s door to demand that the music be turned down.
Whatever the topic and mood, these essays are a pleasure—and any work that name-checks the Nightcrawlers’ proto-punk classic “The Little Black Egg” deserves the broadest possible readership.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-891241-53-6
Page Count: 300
Publisher: YETI/Verse Chorus
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2007
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
© 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.
