An impressive bit of literary journalism and a sympathetic look at a vanished era.
The rise and fall of the ultimate hipster enclave as seen through the eyes of a heartbroken survivor.
In the early 1990s, when few were paying attention and the rest of the borough’s demographic still reflected years of white flight, droves of skinny Caucasians started a surprising reverse migration into an even more forsaken part of the borough to the north called Williamsburg. The costs of this new kingdom were grungy hovels and the occasional dark-corner knife attack—an easy bargain for wild American youths high on big-city dreams. Many of Anasi’s (Literary Journalism/Univ. of California, Irvine; The Gloves: A Boxing Chronicle, 2002) cohorts reveled in their cracked concrete cocoons, sheathed from the perceived banalities of the inauthentic wider world outside Williamsburg. Most were flat broke, but awash in a tide of easy sex, drugs and music. The party would not last long, however. The high-rise building boom that billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg later unleashed on the city decimated Brooklyn’s stoop-side culture, and this time forgotten Williamsburg was included on the hit list. Left to lament the uncanny transformation and the passing of his youth, the author found himself roaming Williamsburg’s sanitized waterfront as a literary wraith intent on reanimating the untamed lives of those he once knew. With a fine ear for dialogue and a nonjudgmental eye, Anasi conjures the pre-9/11 atmosphere of the place, in which the beer flowed like water and there was always a place to crash after a night of pub crawling.
An impressive bit of literary journalism and a sympathetic look at a vanished era.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-374-53331-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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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