So crammed that it belies navigation and so committed to its cause that it erodes believability: a text that provides ample...
Terrific material on Hollywood resisters, marred by imprecision and excess.
Buhle (American Civilization/Brown Univ.) and journalist Wagner attempt to “capture the rich texture of the lives of those . . . Hollywoodites named in congressional hearings during the late 1940s and early 1950s as ‘subversive.’ ” Co-author of Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Blacklist (1997), Buhle knows his subject and reveals it in his extensive background on leftist golden-era screenwriters and players like Michael Wilson and John Howard Lawson, who were affected by blacklisting. Also interesting is the ongoing analysis of how film genres like fantasy, noir, and westerns were reshaped by their left-leaning writers and actors. But these two strong elements, though the focus of the narrative, are regularly obscured by profuse side information and commentary that generates contentiousness rather than illumination. For example, most people are identified in terms of their relation to the cause: “left-leaning screenwriter (later semi-friendly witness) Melvin Levy”; “French Catholic radical critic Andre Bazin”; etc. Perceived opponents are dismissed; Catholicism is negatively conservative; and the Judeo-Christian tradition offers only “reaffirmation of the social order.” Anachronistic modern-day lingo applied to historical figures (for example, the description of Depression-era screenwriter John Bright's wife, Josefina Fierro, as “the leading Chicana of the Left”) compromises overall believability. Also aggravating are the authors’ many questionable assertions presented as fact: that no later film of Katharine Hepburn's approached the accomplishments of left-wing-written Holiday and The Philadelphia Story (how about The African Queen?); that Hollywood drove Clifford Odets's self-opinion so low that “giving names was only one more self-abasement” (an excuse?); that Warner Bros. required a “happy ending” for its films (what about White Heat?). Such comments don't diminish the authors’ good intentions, just their trustworthiness.
So crammed that it belies navigation and so committed to its cause that it erodes believability: a text that provides ample background but limited enjoyment. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: May 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-56584-718-0
Page Count: 480
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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