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
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
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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