A finely etched and hand-colored portrait from one of those rare reporters who has lived long and hard in his beat.
Manhattan south of 42nd Street (with a handful of excursions north), rendered in all its delirious human evidence by veteran newsman Hamill (Forever, 2002, etc.).
“New York,” Hamill writes, “is a city of daily irritations, occasional horrors, hourly tests of will and even courage, and huge dollops of pure beauty.” For this native son, it is also “infused with a mixture of memory, myth, lore, and history, bound together in an erratic, subjective way” by a man who has lived within the mysterious mixture of those elements. Hamill’s delightful, informative, and elegantly shaded account starts with his mother, who took her children on excursions through Brooklyn and one day stopped while viewing the Manhattan skyline to say to her thunderstruck son, “You’ve seen it before . . . It’s Oz.” Our very own wizard then proceeds to take readers on a historically rich, memoir-laden walking tour of the area below Times Square, covering not just the architecture and anecdotes that grace each of the city’s parishes, but their emotions, from greed to explosive anger. The city’s continuous changes prompt what New Yorkers have come to recognize as their own special sense of nostalgia. “In some unplanned way,” Hamill finds, “part of the Battery is now a necropolis.” The current Trinity Church stands on the site of two previous houses of worship. The Commissioner’s Plan of 1811 imposed “rigid order on wildness” with a street grid but could not truly impose technique over topography; Broadway, with its “honking velocity”, simply ignores the grid as it angles southeast to northwest. Historian, geographer, and frequenter of emporia, Hamill revels in everything from the Jewish Rialto of Second Avenue to the once-vibrant newspaper district of Park Row. Most of all, he hails a citizenry that refused to be lectured about sin and knew from the beginning that “the only way human beings could live together here was by practicing tolerance.”
A finely etched and hand-colored portrait from one of those rare reporters who has lived long and hard in his beat.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-316-73451-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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
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
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