Whatever the nuggets of interest, this reads like an endless magazine article in need of editorial shaping and some kind of...
A hit-and-miss oral history of the “youthquake” year, from a predominantly British perspective.
Former Sunday Times Magazine editor in chief Morgan and Leve (It Could Be Worse, You Could Be Me, 2010) show how the advent of the birth control pill, the ascent of youth-oriented designers and models and photographers, the sex scandals that rocked the British government (but barely registered in the States), and the general feeling that life as well as youth were short were all integral elements of this seismic shift. Maintains Andrew Loog Oldham, former manager of the Rolling Stones, “It wasn’t the Beatles and it wasn’t the Rolling Stones, it was Vidal Sassoon, it was Mary Quant, David Bailey, the models, they were the start of it.” All are represented here, along with musicians who have covered this period more colorfully in their own books (Keith Richards, Bill Wyman, Eric Clapton) and a smattering of Americans, including journalists Robert Christgau and Gay Talese, both of whom could undoubtedly write books on the topic with greater depth and insight. “If I write my book, if it will be about anything, it will be about the Beatles and the Stones and the Supremes in ’64,” says Christgau, referencing the year that much of what is detailed in this book had more impact in America. He also testifies to his part in the sexual revolution: “I was having sex at least every two weeks throughout that entire period.” The authors mostly disappear from the text after proclaiming that “[i]n just one year, the landscape of our lives, loves and looks changed forever.” However, there’s no indication of when these interviews took place, whether they were all for this specific book or why these particular people were selected (Stevie Nicks in a book about 1963?).
Whatever the nuggets of interest, this reads like an endless magazine article in need of editorial shaping and some kind of organizing principle.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-212044-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: It Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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