A boffo collection of 60 brief essays detailing the historical accuracy of popular movies from Jurassic Park to Gone With the Wind to All the President's Men. To complement these classics, editor Carnes (History/Barnard) has assembled a virtual ``Who's Who'' of modern historians, including Antonia Fraser, Simon Schama, Frances FitzGerald, Peter Gay, and William Manchester. In their essays these historians repeatedly demonstrate that, in the words of William E. Leuchtenberg, ``a film can be accurate without being true.'' For in Hollywood, history is usually only a starting point. And whether it be The Scarlet Empress or Reds, moviemakers have tended not to let something as petty as the truth stand in the way of a good story. As John Ford put it in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, ``When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.'' So Wyatt Earp is transformed from a corrupt gambler and con man into an avatar of justice. In Oliver Stone's hands, JFK becomes a victim of a military-industrial complex, the Vietnam War's holiest martyr. As several authors grimly note, these Hollywood histrionics come to be regarded as fact by many viewers. The irony is that while the plots might be confections, the details, costumes, and decor are painstakingly and expensively correct. The Last of the Mohicans may bear little factual relation to its supposed subject, the French and Indian War, but at least everyone's moccasins look impeccably authentic. While the essays are almost uniformly shrewd, insightful, and provocative, they are ill-served by the book's awkward layout, which haphazardly scatters photographs and clumps of text about the margins. But this is a minor quibble, especially in the face of such an invaluable and entertaining corrective to all the bombast and blather that pass for Hollywood history. A remarkable resource. (400 b&w photos, not seen) (Book-of-the-Month Club/Quality Paperback Book Club selections; History Book Club main selection)
Pub Date: Sept. 11, 1995
ISBN: 0-8050-3759-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
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
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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