To muse over like old film clips in this election year, here are Mailer's four newsmaking reports of conventions past—including the whole of Miami and the Siege of Chicago—with a preface that invites us to consider them together. As a novelist, he writes, he was expected to "see the world with my own eyes and my own words"; he had the advantage over a journalist that he could explore a situation and reflect upon the nature of its reality. So, covering the 1960 nomination of JFK in Los Angeles for Esquire, he wrote "Superman Comes to the Supermarket." The Democratic elect are assembled for what was to be the last time—Stevenson glowing like a lover ("one was reminded of Chaplin"), Johnson the compromised, Eleanor Roosevelt, "a lady who was finally becoming a woman," Carmine DeSapio and Kenneth Galbraith (Mailer's pregnant pairing), scrappy Bobby Kennedy, and of course JFK: the musical comedy hero, the embodiment of that "ecstasy and violence which is the dream life of the nation." (Did Mailer, as he suggests elsewhere, create Camelot?) Less intense but hardly less pointed is the delineation of the Goldwater and Scranton forces at San Francisco in 1964, caught up in a contest otherwise slated for oblivion; and then one comes to Mailer's still-festering impressions of the 1968 conventions in Miami and Chicago. By 1972 the impulse seems to be spent, for he makes the McGovern victory as boring as the Nixon gala, perhaps more so; as he acknowledges, his strength is the perverse. But in the meantime his personal, novelist's journalism, intersecting with Sixties' individualism, spawned the Hunter Thompsons—no future campaign will be left to Teddy White—and in the New York Times now John Leonard writes familiarly of the fall of Superfan (Nixon). The inclusion of photographs seems a mistake; Mailer's politics zoom larger than life.
Pub Date: April 1, 1976
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1976
BOOK REVIEW
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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