Form, light, scale, context, time—architecture, Moore ably shows, has the power to represent deep, abiding hope.
A voracious exploration of emotion as part of the creation and evolution of architecture.
There are times in reading this book when Observer architecture critic Moore seems breathless, so unstoppable is his hunger to get at the soul of the building process. Architecture is desire, he writes; it “is not a thing of pure reason or function, but is shaped by human emotions...and shapes them.” Buildings, said the Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi, “act not alone, but reciprocally with the people and things around them, that they have to be open to chance, time, and life.” Moore gracefully draws out when architecture enables other events and experiences to happen, and he explains how a city can contain multiple versions of itself. The “collective marvel” of a city is not, ultimately, the work of great architects, but the creation of “property developers in pursuit of their self-interest, real or perceived.” The author also shows readers the flamboyance and sheer brilliance of Zaha Hadid and a worshipful company of celebrity architects—heart-stopping in their vision one second, then indulging in the post-9/11 “carnival of bitch-slapping and back-stabbing, of name-calling, pretention, manipulation, and posturing.” Still, Moore supplies many exhilarating examples of architecture, from the wild exuberancy of Dubai to Prague’s Muller House by Adolf Loos, from the Moscow Metro to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, and how they—and many more—all have shaped lives in profound ways as both symbol and instrument. The dozens of included photos are also helpful.
Form, light, scale, context, time—architecture, Moore ably shows, has the power to represent deep, abiding hope.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-227753-4
Page Count: 422
Publisher: Harper Design
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2013
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 Yorker staff 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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