Charmingly full of life, if not always coherent.
Hot-blooded history of a hedonistic Jazz Age resort where celebrity and mob culture mingled within gawking distance of the sensation-seeking masses.
Historian Vanderwood (Juan Soldado: Rapist, Murderer, Martyr, Saint, 2004, etc.) seems to have enjoyed himself writing this account of Agua Caliente, a gambler’s and drinker’s paradise that rose in response to Prohibition America—and which was conveniently located just over the border in Tijuana, Mexico. With its high-class pretensions and low-brow diversions, Agua Caliente became a primary model for Las Vegas, a place where ordinarily “good” Americans could play hard at being bad. Its life was brief—less than ten years passed between its opening in mid 1928 and its unceremonious closing under orders of Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas in 1937—but what it lacked in duration, it made up for in color and influence. Vanderwood weaves into the resort’s history one of its most notorious moments, a botched robbery of an Agua Caliente money car as it made its way from Tijuana to a bank in San Diego. The incident left two dead and one of the mobsters wounded. Using as primary sources detective magazines, newspaper articles and trial transcripts, the author discourses on the rise of Eastern-style organized crime in Southern California. The tales of the hoodlums, molls, tax cheats, bribers, corrupt officials, would-be ambassadors, harlots, starlets and free-spending movie moguls whose lives intersected around this moment in history—little operas that Vanderwood relates, often in whimsical, hard-boiled prose—vividly conjure the pre-technicolor world of 1930s Hollywood melodramas. This is a book about much more than one place and time—race, fortune, law and (dis)order, border politics and economics all figure in the story of Agua Caliente.
Charmingly full of life, if not always coherent.Pub Date: May 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4702-6
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Duke Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2010
Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
SEEN & HEARD
An eclectic assortment of women make for an entertaining read.
An exuberant celebration of more than 100 women who shaped the myths and realities of New York City.
In her debut book, journalist Scelfo, who has written for the New York Times and Newsweek, aims to counter histories of New York that focus only on “male political leaders and male activists and male cultural tastemakers.” As the author discovered and shows, the contributions of women have been deeply significant, and she has chosen a copious roster of personalities, gathered under three dozen rubrics, such as “The Caretakers” (pioneering physicians Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell and Dr. Sara Josephine Baker, who enacted revolutionary hygienic measures in early-20th-century tenements); “The Loudmouths” (Joan Rivers and Better Midler); and “Wall Street” (brokerage firm founder Victoria Woodhull and miserly investor Hetty Green). With a plethora of women to choose from, Scelfo aimed for representation from musical theater, law enforcement, education, social justice movements, and various professions and organizations. Some of the women are familiar (Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis for her preservation work; Brooke Astor for her philanthropy), some iconic (Emma Lazarus, in a category of her own as “The Beacon”), and some little-known (artist Hildreth Meière, whose art deco designs can be seen on the south facade of Radio City Music Hall). One odd category is “The Crooks,” which includes several forgettable women who contributed to the city’s “cons and crimes.” The author’s brief, breezy bios reveal quirky facts about each woman, a form better suited to “The In-Crowd” (restaurateur Elaine Kaufman, hardly a crowd), entertainers (Betty Comden, Ethel Waters), and “The Wisecrackers” (Nora Ephron, Tina Fey) than to Susan Sontag, Edith Wharton, and Joan Didion. Nevertheless, the book is lively and fun, with something, no doubt, to pique anyone’s interest. Heald’s blithe illustrations add to the lighthearted mood.
An eclectic assortment of women make for an entertaining read.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-58005-653-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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