by Simon Baatz ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2018
An entertaining recital of a notorious scandal.
The history of a crime of passion that revealed the sordid underside of the Gilded Age.
In 1906, millionaire Harry Thaw strode up to Stanford White (b. 1853), who was seated at a theater production in Madison Square Garden, and shot and killed him. Thaw claimed he was avenging the rape of his wife, actress Evelyn Nesbit, which had occurred in 1901, when Nesbit was a 16-year-old chorus girl. The shocking murder and the titillating details disclosed by Thaw’s two trials have been chronicled many times by historians as well as by the two protagonists in their gossipy memoirs. Baatz (History/John Jay Coll., CUNY; For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder that Shocked Chicago, 2008, etc.) takes a fresh—though groundbreaking—look at the scandal, drawing mostly on newspaper reports to create a fast-paced narrative. At the time of his murder, White was one of the most esteemed architects in New York, the designer, in fact, of Madison Square Garden. Although married, he was known for his liaisons with pretty young actresses and models, upon whom he bestowed pricey gifts. Anthony Comstock, in his campaign to suppress vice, claimed that White, along with other wealthy men, participated in orgies with young, vulnerable girls. Baatz questions just how vulnerable Nesbit was: even after the alleged rape, she benefited from White’s largesse. Thaw was astonishingly wealthy, too, and Nesbit overlooked his often strange behavior to marry him. During a European trip, Nesbit apparently—the author questions the veracity of some testimony—confided details of the rape, which incensed Thaw. Apparently, his anger fomented for years before the killing. Baatz recounts Thaw’s trials and testimony, including evidence of Thaw’s violent treatment of women. Finally, Thaw was deemed insane and incarcerated in a mental asylum. By the time he escaped, he “had achieved an almost mythic status as the heroic individual who had succeeded against the odds and had emerged victorious.” Nesbit, who continued to perform on stage and film, overcame drug addiction to live a quiet life.
An entertaining recital of a notorious scandal.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39665-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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