Few will mourn the eradication of the violence and drugs that once defined 42nd Street, but neither will they cheer its...
“Ground zero for the manufacture, exhibition, and distribution of pornography, drug dealing, pedophilia, prostitution, and violent street crime,” the old 42nd Street gets a root-tootin’ sendoff.
As a home to raunch, the stretch of 42nd Street west of Sixth Avenue has long been true to itself, writes Eliot (To the Limit, 1998, etc.). Even back when it was known as Long Acre Square, in the days before the New York Times moved in and changed the address, it had as many brothels as it did horse stables, as many hoodlums as rats. The author charts the street's sordid past, in which everyone seemed to have a scam to run, from supposedly reputable businessmen like Vanderbilt, Astor, and Chrysler through Boss Tweed and on down to the pimps, cardsharps, and real-estate developers. Eliot has a talent for cutting through the city's byzantine politics without a loss of nuance to explain how mayors from Jimmy Walker and Fiorello La Guardia to Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani played the 42nd Street card to their aggrandizement. He also does a fine job conjuring a sense of the street's atmosphere beyond the sleaze, particularly the diverse world of the performing arts, ranging from the great spaces and great stars to the rehearsal halls, script services, wigmakers, makeup companies, costume-makers, and violin bow–makers to capture the entire theatrical community. Well researched and impressively detailed, the narrative paints a rich picture of the street's evolution. It’s marred only by Eliot’s tendency to logorrhea and weakness for purple prose (“the air began to stink from a turgid waft of human sweat and canned Lysol that hung tough at the nostril level”) that quickly wears thin.
Few will mourn the eradication of the violence and drugs that once defined 42nd Street, but neither will they cheer its transformation into a “big-ticket corporate alley.” (Illustrations throughout)Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2001
ISBN: 0-446-52571-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2001
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
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
© 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.
