Now embraced as a cultural treasure and called the most democratic space in New York, Central Park has a contentious and elitist history—expertly chronicled here by Rosenzweig (History/George Mason Univ.) and Blackmar (History/Columbia Univ.). Conceived by a small group of the wealthy in the 1850s as an answer to Europe's society gathering spaces, the park sparked debates from the beginning: Why did New Yorkers need an uptown park when Hoboken's Elysian Fields were half the distance away? Where should the park be located? What kind of park should it be? A civic monument? A programmed pleasure garden? A commons for public assembly? Or a landscaped preserve of artificial nature, as essentially proposed and executed by chosen designers Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux? And just what public should the park attract? There was not much debate, though, about displacing the site's ``squatters,'' whom Rosenzweig and Blackmar find were members of stable communities: Some owned their property, most probably paid rent, and many were black. And there was no protest when the park became a venue for the rich to see and be seen in their fashionable carriages. While the masses took their pleasure at commercial gardens elsewhere, Olmstead—a tyrant who drove and underpaid park workers, enforced strict decorum among visitors, and elbowed the more sympathetic Vaux out of his share of credit- -maintained the park as a landscape to be viewed. Though the park's creation and early decades are extensively detailed here, the authors complete the political, class-conscious story through years of real-estate speculation, Tammany patronage, and reformers' penury; and then, in the 20th century, through a growing diversity of use and users, and—with homeless residents and millionaire neighbors—an evolving debate over the question of ``whose park is this, anyway?'' Neither dry chronology nor anecdotal diversion, but exemplary social history. (Numerous b&w illustrations.)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-8014-2516-6
Page Count: 600
Publisher: Cornell Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1992
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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