A hit-or-miss, coffee-table grab bag of biography, theorizing, and vibrant images that evoke the glamour and pathos of the...
The exuberant, drunken newlywed days of F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, hold a clue to the true origins of his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, according to this debut illustrated literary/historical study.
Fitzgerald’s celebrated tale of thwarted love among Jazz Age millionaires has long been thought to have been based on the wealthy New York resort town of Great Neck, Long Island, where Scott and Zelda lived from 1922 to ’24. Webb and Robert Steven Williams, defending a theory put forward by journalist Barbara Probst Solomon, made a documentary arguing that the novel was actually inspired by people and places in Westport, Connecticut, where the couple lived for five months in the summer and fall of 1920. Much of this lavish book consists of Webb’s evidence for replacing Great Neck with Westport, an affluent magnet for writers and artists, as the incubator of Fitzgerald’s imagination. Webb identifies Frederick E. Lewis, a handsome plutocrat who gave crazy parties at his Westport estate—Houdini came to one shindig and performed an underwater escape—as a likely model for Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby. Right across the water was another manse that fits the description of Gatsby paramour Daisy Buchanan’s abode, complete with a green light on a big dock similar to the one the writer used as a metaphor for the tragic will-o’-the-wisp of the American dream. Drawing on Fitzgerald’s novels, letter, and diaries, along with period newspaper articles, large maps, and aerial photographs, Webb makes a genial, meandering case for Westport as Gatsbyville. Along the way, he digs up details of Lewis and his cars, yachts, and airplanes; delves into other colorful locals; and recounts his and Williams’ wavering progress at winning over scholars. Fitzgerald fanatics should find this information intriguing. More absorbing for casual readers is Webb’s portrait of Fitzgerald and Zelda’s marriage. Young, good-looking, and fashionable—Fitzgerald’s hit debut novel, This Side of Paradise, had just made them famous—they were the celebrity embodiments of the Roaring ’20s. At Westport, they drank hard—Fitzgerald’s “daily intake could top” a quart of gin and 30 beers—and partied harder, with Zelda notorious for her sloshed witticisms and whimsical arsons. Webb traces this trajectory through its inevitable decline into fights; money pressures; infidelity; literary disappointments and mutual recriminations; Fitzgerald’s plunge into lethal alcoholism; and Zelda’s descent into schizophrenia. Readers are reminded that the real-life Gatsby was Fitzgerald himself, pursuing the flapper wild child who always slipped his grasp. Webb’s sketch of their saga is workmanlike and lucid. Though disorganized, with digressions and repetitions, the account has some nice literary turns. (“I became so immersed in the world of the Fitzgerald parties, the hedonism of the Roaring Twenties, and reading about the oceans of gin Scott Fitzgerald imbibed, that at one point I thought I actually smelled gin in the room.”) There is much poignancy in the photos of Fitzgerald and Zelda in Westport, lounging on the lawn or the beach, relaxed and eager for the future, enjoying a season of happiness before it all went to hell.
A hit-or-miss, coffee-table grab bag of biography, theorizing, and vibrant images that evoke the glamour and pathos of the Fitzgerald marriage.Pub Date: June 26, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63226-097-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Prospecta Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 23, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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