Though not a cohesive narrative, these isolated journalistic essays provide an entertaining picture of New York through the...
A series of biographies of significant New York City buildings that “have been transcendent in some way.”
Despite the title, this is the history of 27 structures, although a great deal of New York’s past makes an appearance. “Can collective conglomerations of bricks, glass, wood, steel, and mortar reveal the soul of a city?” Definitely, writes Roberts (Only in New York: An Exploration of the World's Most Fascinating, Frustrating and Irrepressible City, 2018, etc.), the former urban affairs correspondent of the New York Times. The author offers a solid education in New York architecture that pays close attention to the personalities, politics, economics, and natural disasters that inevitably accompany it. Eschewing the commonplace, Roberts begins with the oldest house, which is in Queens. Built in 1661 when the city was Dutch, it was home to John Bowne, a Quaker preacher and source of a petition, signed by a group of neighbors, objecting to director-general Peter Stuyvesant’s order banning Quakers. The author points out that this is a foundational document of American freedom written over a century before the Bill of Rights (also born in New York). Even educated readers will identify only a minority of Roberts’ choices, including St. Paul’s Chapel, City Hall, the Flatiron Building, Tweed Courthouse, Empire State Building, Grand Central Terminal, and the Apollo Theater. A laundromat was once a branch of Bank of the United States. Notwithstanding the name, it was a private institution whose collapse in 1931 launched the banking crisis which, perhaps more than the 1929 stock market crash, converted a normal recession into the Great Depression. New York’s poorest district, the South Bronx, hosted the huge American Bank Note Plant, which churned out currency, stamps, and stock securities for nations around the world. It moved away in the early 1980s; the building remains as a landmark, and the area is prospering.
Though not a cohesive narrative, these isolated journalistic essays provide an entertaining picture of New York through the centuries.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-62040-980-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
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. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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