A promising account of a bygone era loses steam when moving into modern times.
Glory days in Gotham.
Sportswriter Laughland’s account of the contests between the Yankees, Giants, Dodgers, and Mets—before the Giants and Dodgers moved to greener pastures—starts ambitiously with an epigraph from The Great Gatsby about the “wild promise” of the city as seen from the Queensboro Bridge. The author resurrects long-forgotten history. The Brooklyn team, for instance, was initially dubbed the Trolley Dodgers because pedestrians “were forced to bob and weave to avoid the borough’s countless trolley cars.” And former Giants owner Charles A. Stoneham had business dealings with Arnold Rothstein, the infamous “fixer” of the 1919 World Series. The nascent origin stories of the national pastime are nicely sketched out, with nods to the socioeconomic factors that led to its success—the completion of subways that made it easier for fans to get to Yankee Stadium, Ebbets Field, and the Polo Grounds. The rivalries between the Giants and Yankees are a pleasure to read about, with the Giants—led by Hall of Fame pitcher Christy Mathewson—facing off against the Yankees’ Murderers’ Row of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig and, later, Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle. Well portrayed, too, are the Giants’ nurturing of epochally great centerfielder (and noted Harlem stickball player) Willie Mays, under the ministrations of the volatile Leo Durocher. The tale starts to sag when midseason bouts between the Mets and Yankees (and occasional fall classic contests) are elevated to the stature of the “Subway Series” of old. Also weakening the text are an abundance of cliches (such as athletes “taking the sport by storm”) and coy references to the Mets as “the Amazin’s.”
A promising account of a bygone era loses steam when moving into modern times.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781493092734
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
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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