A nuanced, comprehensive portrait of unique man and the surrounding period, culture and political system.
Zacks (The Pirate Coast: Thomas Jefferson, the First Marines, and the Secret Mission of 1805, 2005, etc.) returns with a sharply focused look at Theodore Roosevelt’s brief tenure as a New York City police commissioner.
The author begins and ends with allusions to the naked goddess Diana perched atop Madison Square Garden—his symbol for the sensual interests of New Yorkers that Roosevelt was intent on controlling, if not diminishing to the vanishing point. Zacks sketches the anti-vice career of crusading preacher Charles H. Parkhurst, whose efforts Roosevelt supported and broadened. The incredibly energetic Roosevelt worked long daylight hours and then, often, patrolled the streets at night, checking up on cops to see who was sleeping, drinking, whoring and otherwise neglecting his duty. Frequently accompanying and guiding Roosevelt was journalist Jacob Riis, whose pioneering photo-journalistic How the Other Half Lives highlighted the economic extremities endured by many in the city. As Zacks points out, Roosevelt had initial popular and journalistic support for his efforts at vice control, but when he began devoting many police resources (and lots of political capital) to enforcing blue laws, both the press and the public began to turn against him. Because many workers had only Sundays off, the dry-on-Sunday policy made many working men and women very unhappy. As the political sands shifted beneath him, Roosevelt redoubled his efforts, alienating more voters, and began seeking ways out of his increasingly stressful and polarizing position. Relief came when newly elected President McKinley appointed him the assistant secretary of the Navy. The author takes us inside fin-de-siècle brothels and bars, Tammany Hall and courtrooms, contentious commissioners’ meetings and cops’ barracks.
A nuanced, comprehensive portrait of unique man and the surrounding period, culture and political system.Pub Date: March 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-385-51972-4
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2011
PROFILES
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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