A heady but often murky brew.
Broad, overambitious cultural history of New Orleans, from its inauspicious beginnings to its arrival as an important American city by 1819.
Radio and music producer Sublette (Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo, 2004) plows through several centuries, never quite deciding whether to concentrate on history or culture—or on what to omit. After a marshy site at the mouth of the Mississippi was reluctantly chosen by the French in 1698 as a post to keep out the British, he writes, New Orleans soon joined Santo Domingo and Havana as part of a preeminent metropolis in the region—the three cities constantly changed colonial masters and influenced each other profoundly. Unable to make New Orleans attractive to settlers, the French had to rely on forced emigration (it was briefly a penal colony). The duc d’Orleans hoped to make the city profitable by licensing Scottish speculator John Law’s notorious Mississippi Company; frenzied speculation and then a hideous 1721 crash did nothing for the city’s financial stability. Consequently, the fledgling town took on a unique personality during the two principal periods identified by the author. The French era got underway when African slaves began arriving in 1719. Mostly from Senegal, many were sophisticated artisans and brought with them distinct forms of dancing, drums and music. The Spanish period began in 1762, when Louis XV gave the territory to his cousin Carlos III, and ended with Napoleon’s sale of Louisiana to America in 1803. The Spanish, Sublette argues, gave New Orleans its definitive character, establishing a strong town council and creating a true urban center. Under a relatively progressive legal code, slaves could own property and buy their freedom. Describing New Orleans culture as an ajiaco (stew), Sublette throws a few too many ingredients into the pot, incorporating revolutions in America, France and Haiti as well as myriad forms of music and religion.
A heady but often murky brew.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-55652-730-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Lawrence Hill Books/Chicago Review
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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