A welcome look at a city—a mass of cities—not often heard from in the urban-studies literature and of wide interest well...
Given enough political will and enough choice, we can save the world. Or, as this case study shows, we can let things continue to go to hell in a handbasket lined with peach blossoms.
Atlanta, the titular center city, contains only some 7 percent of the 6 million inhabitants of the greater area called Atlanta. That metropolis, writes native son Pendergrast (Beyond Fair Trade: How One Small Coffee Company Helped Transform a Hillside Village in Thailand, 2015, etc.), constitutes a “vast world where most people who say they live ‘in Atlanta’ actually reside” strung out somewhere on a beltway or endless avenue named, inevitably, Peachtree. The BeltLine is one, “a twenty-two-mile ring of mostly defunct rail lines, running through forty-five neighborhoods girdling Atlanta’s downtown.” Faced with this crumbling bit of infrastructure, Atlanta writ large has been trying to remake it to spur development and redevelopment, bringing life to an often ghostly downtown, and, with luck, easing the city’s notorious gridlock. In all this, Atlanta has discernible options that may lead to better tomorrows in a nation not well known for long-term thinking. The author turns in a lively urban history, charting Atlanta’s growth and linking it to political developments over time—not least of them Jim Crow laws that forged many of those wrong-side-of-the-tracks neighborhoods. He is generally optimistic, even in a time when taxpayers are reluctant to shoulder the burden of improving the commonweal: “Change is in the air in Atlanta,” he writes, “mostly for the good.” Where money and political will have been spent, that is, things have changed for the better, though the author also reckons, eyes open, that the possibility also exists that Atlantans will “continue to live segregated and unequal lives.”
A welcome look at a city—a mass of cities—not often heard from in the urban-studies literature and of wide interest well beyond the I-95 corridor.Pub Date: May 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-465-05473-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
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
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