Anderson’s back-and-forth style is challenging, and he has an unfortunate penchant for gratuitous profanity. Nevertheless,...

BOOM TOWN

THE FANTASTICAL SAGA OF OKLAHOMA CITY, ITS CHAOTIC FOUNDING, ITS PURLOINED BASKETBALL TEAM, AND THE DREAM OF BECOMING A WORLD-CLASS METROPOLIS

An irreverent look at one of the nation’s quirkier cities, “one of the great weirdo cities of the world.”

“In the larger economy of American attention,” writes Anderson, “Oklahoma City’s main job has always been to be ignored.” The author, a winner of a National Magazine Award, seeks to rectify this popular neglect via a rollicking history of the nation’s 27th-largest city. Founded in one day in 1889, Oklahoma City has garnered a reputation for violence (its first mayor died of a gunshot wound), chaotic weather (the first photograph of a tornado was taken there), and grandiose, outsized ambition (its Will Rogers World Airport has no international flights). Anderson helpfully profiles several of the residents and leaders who have given the city its unique character, including civil rights activist Clara Luper, legendary weatherman Gary England, and Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne. But the book centers on the Oklahoma City Thunder, the NBA team formerly known as the Seattle Supersonics. Led by the supremely talented duo of Russell Westbrook (an enigmatic, hellbent-for-leather point guard) and Kevin Durant (a quietly efficient scoring machine), the Thunder reached the Finals in 2012 only to regress in subsequent years, culminating in a heartbreaking defeat in the 2016 playoffs at the hands of the Golden State Warriors, with whom Durant subsequently signed as a free agent. Anderson toggles between recent Thunder seasons and the history of Oklahoma City, portraying the team’s highs and lows as symbols of the town’s boom-and-bust story. Unquestionably, the residents have forged a deep bond with the Thunder. In one of the book’s more touching moments, Anderson interviews an Oklahoma Supreme Court justice who notes how the arrival of the franchise in 2008 helped to heal the figurative wounds inflicted by the terrorist bombing 13 years earlier.

Anderson’s back-and-forth style is challenging, and he has an unfortunate penchant for gratuitous profanity. Nevertheless, he provides an entertaining history of a city that, for all its booms and busts, is never boring.

Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-8041-3731-7

Page Count: 432

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 28, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018

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The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.

TOMBSTONE

THE EARP BROTHERS, DOC HOLLIDAY, AND THE VENDETTA RIDE FROM HELL

Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.

The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.

Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.

Pub Date: April 21, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4

Page Count: 400

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020

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