An absolute treat. Hopefully, the New Yorker will continue to publish such anthologies on other decades.
Make room on the bookshelf. The New Yorker’s look at 1940s history, culture, literature and civilization is a book to be read, reread and savored.
Divided into seven sections—The War, American Scenes, Postwar, Character Studies, The Critics, Poetry and Fiction—this book shows how founder Harold Ross (1892-1951) could single out the most important aspects of history and culture—and not just of New York, but of the country. As a further bonus, each of the sections features an introduction from a contemporary writer; these include George Packer, Zadie Smith, Susan Orlean, David Denby and Louis Menand. After the war, the magazine, toning down its New York–centric stance, experienced a journalistic awakening. In this book, the editors begin each section with a short explanation of the genre followed by “Notes and Comments” by the eternally delightful personification of the New Yorker, E.B. White. Readers are certain to enjoy the beautiful writing, clever thinking and insightful thoughts across a vast range of topics. To choose an article, poem or short story from this great wealth of writing is beyond difficult: There is Lillian Ross’ indictment of the House Un-American Activities Committee; Joseph Mitchell’s article on McSorley’s Old Ale house, the oldest Irish tavern in New York City; Richard O. Boyer’s profile of Duke Ellington, who took jazz from New Orleans bawdy houses to Paris and beyond; and E.J. Kahn’s hagiographic profile of the widowed Eleanor Roosevelt. Don’t look for cartoons—they’ve had enough coffee-table books of their own; this is the soul of the New Yorker. An abbreviated list of the contributors includes such luminaries as Edmund Wilson, Rebecca West, A.J. Liebling, George Orwell, W.H. Auden, John Hersey, Langston Hughes, Carson McCullers and William Maxwell.
An absolute treat. Hopefully, the New Yorker will continue to publish such anthologies on other decades.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-679-64479-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
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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