From the rigidly stratified life in the 1920s and ’30s during J&L’s “despotic prime,” to the brief, postwar golden age,...
A senior Sports Illustrated writer tells a multigenerational story about Aliquippa, a Pennsylvania steel town, and its legendary high school football team.
Heavy industry and football share the same DNA, writes Price (Heart of the Game: Life, Death, and Mercy in Minor League America, 2009, etc.). Both feature a hierarchical management structure; both involve collective striving, with various skills merging to produce the desired result; both “depend on—even celebrate—the implicit trade of health for money” or celebrity. Since the early 1900s, when the J&L Steel Company designed and built the town, until today, as surely as the blast furnaces once reliably churned out pig iron, the Quips have won a succession of regional and state championships, producing an astonishing number of football stars, most notably Mike Ditka, Tony Dorsett, Ty Law, and Darrelle Revis. Price thoroughly explores the football saga, focusing on four particularly successful coaches and their teams, but this is no mere sports story. The author produces an artful mix of history, economics, sociology, and athletics. He makes room for sketches of distinguished, nonsports native sons (composer Henry Mancini), a reform-minded governor’s wife, a J&L official who bossed the town, and Aliquippa’s first black mayor. As he travels through the decades, he packs the narrative with telling episodes: the presidential visits of John F. Kennedy and Jimmy Carter, a landmark Supreme Court labor case slapping down J&L, the high school walkouts of the 1960s, protesting the lack of black cheerleaders. Price’s especially touching engravings of “promise squandered,” those chewed up and spit out by Aliquippa’s tough environment, contrast powerfully with the tales of football triumph.
From the rigidly stratified life in the 1920s and ’30s during J&L’s “despotic prime,” to the brief, postwar golden age, “a moment of civic equipoise,” to today’s “company town without a company,” where the combination of unemployment, drugs, and crime crushes hope, Price’s football story is really that of America’s Rust Belt in poignant miniature.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2564-4
Page Count: 462
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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 Yorkerstaff 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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