by Mark Stein ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2017
Witty and opinionated insight on how “bad” behavior can morph into, out of, and back into favor over the course of time.
How and why the tolerances for debauchery have changed over the course of time.
Screenwriter, playwright, and author Stein (American Panic: A History of Who Scares Us and Why, 2014, etc.) formulates an astute, fascinating, occasionally overwrought treatise on why vices became such hot-button issues in past eras yet tend to normalize and often empower today. The author reaches back as far as the beginnings of the British settlements when Native Americans shared their tobacco and thus provoked a perennial “tail-chasing war on vice.” Smoking soon became frowned upon, even outlawed, as did bowling, shuffleboard, and juggling, all activities considered gateways to gambling, brawls, and witchcraft. Stein moves from puritanical Massachusetts, with laws against adultery, virginal sex, and homosexual acts, to the post-Revolution vices of pornography and prostitution. The author also spotlights America’s nationwide war on drugs, the beginning of which occurred with the Opium Exclusion Act in 1909. Whether it was 19th-century housewives addicted to laudanum, Mormon polygamists, Nevada prostitution, or interracial sex, vices, writes Stein, remain a constant source of pleasure for indulgers and aggravation for detractors. Much progress has been made, he notes, in overhauling industries such as the movie business, which has historically promoted violence through action films while glamorizing drug use and cigarettes. Stein takes particular aim at public moral reformers throughout history—e.g., moralist Anthony Comstock and the Catholic Church, both entities who made their marks on society by staunchly advocating vice repression. The author regrettably devotes less attention to our modern, politically challenged, easily offended society, where freedom still reigns and creative arts, even excessively controversial expressions, remain unpunishable under the First Amendment. Stein believes that in examining what was considered a vice a century ago, juxtaposed with what is considered immoral by today’s standards, we are offered a glimpse into how morals and behaviors shape-shift and how we all change and adapt within an ever evolving society.
Witty and opinionated insight on how “bad” behavior can morph into, out of, and back into favor over the course of time.Pub Date: July 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61234-894-0
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Potomac Books
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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