Moody, sweet-spirited survey of lowlifes, castoffs, and misfits along Broadway, from Battery Park to Times Square. Cohn (King Death, 1975; Rock from the Beginning, 1969) embraces everybody, standing up for thieves, transvestites, and grotesques with hearts of gold. In Battery Park, his Virgil is 20- year-old, drum-playing Sasha Zim from Moscow, a cabdriver in ``bomber jacket and Hawaiian shirt, jogging pants, lumberjack boots, a buffalo-head Western belt and a small silver crucifix,'' who learned English from daytime soap operas and says things such as, ``In taxi is university of all mankinds, what you don't know won't hurt you, what you do is killing you dead. Whole world is going Helen Handbasket.'' Sasha introduces Cohn to a Hispanic team of ``Liberty Boosters,'' pickpockets of the Liberty Bay ferry, one of whom is Stoney, who has ``the rapture'' (epileptic attacks during which God speaks to him) and to whom wallets leap if he merely ``consents to receive'' them. Moving into an eight-by-ten- foot room in Times Square's walk-up Moose Hotel, Cohn meets his young, dope-taking alcoholic transvestite neighbor, Lush Life, a vision in Passion Pink nail polish who left home at 15 and forever abandoned her real name of Geraldo Cruz. Cohn gives us much background on P.T. Barnum and his famed museum of freaks, on Hubert's Museum and Flea Circus in Times Square, on the Gilded Age and Evelyn Nesbit and Stanford White, on the sins of Robert Moses (whose rebuilding plans for the city, Cohn says, cast whole populations into the street), on the sex shops and the Metropole jazz bar (now gone topless) and McSorley's men-only saloon (now letting in women), and on Times Square's Chess and Checkers Club. He ends on chords that can only be called ashen. Striving like Whitman, not cynical, but at last quite desolate.
Pub Date: Feb. 10, 1992
ISBN: 0-394-56869-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1991
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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