An intriguing episodic account of true crime and survival on New York’s outer edges.
A compilation of The New York Sun’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 1948-49 series, which uncovered widespread corruption and violence affecting the longshoremen who toiled along the city's crime-ridden waterfront.
Written by investigative reporter Johnson, “Crimes on the Waterfront” exposed the racketeering that had crept like cancer through the shipping trade and threatened the lives of blue-collar Gothamites. Crooked hiring bosses, loaders and stevedores outnumbered the honest longshoremen, who in order to stay employed were forced to take loans from shark bosses, pay steep kickbacks, ignore pilfering and keep their mouths shut or end up dead under a pier. Local corruption had a direct effect on the city’s economy as prices soared and shippers avoided New York like the pirate’s cove it was. Though allegations of communist sympathies and death threats were made against Johnson and his family, the series prompted a reformation of the local shipping trade and served as the basis for Budd Schulberg’s most famous screenplay. The volume at hand reprints the series with a foreword from Johnson’s son Haynes (also a Pulitzer winner) and an introduction by Schulberg, as well as additional articles by the screenwriter on the same subject. Johnson, who died in 1976, is fearless in his coverage of those most affected by the criminal activity, making these articles a saga of racketeering and the everyman. Soaked in the vernacular of the late 1940s, his prose offers a strictly factual interpretation of the issues. The series remains as it first appeared in The Sun, so reading individual articles in succession becomes somewhat repetitive due to the unavoidable refreshers intended for the original newspaper readership. Framed by Schulberg’s more cinematic articles depicting life on the waterfront with plenty of individual portraiture, Johnson’s series gains an associative literary texture that fleshes out this seriously roughneck subject.
An intriguing episodic account of true crime and survival on New York’s outer edges.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-59609-013-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Chamberlain Bros./Penguin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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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