A sturdy, detailed work of history that will appeal to business readers as well as aficionados of railroading and the Old...
The West wasn’t won with six guns alone. Well-greased skillets helped, too, especially in the hands of Fred Harvey’s cooks.
By journalist and pop historian Fried’s account, 19th-century British immigrant Fred Harvey was “the founding father of the American service industry.” That doesn’t strictly translate into low-wage, go-nowhere jobs, however. Harvey arrived in America with practically nothing, built a small nest egg, was swindled by an early partner and worked diligently to build a fortune again. He was a close observer of the restaurant trade in New York, and he understood the value of paying cash and refusing to extend or receive credit, and, crucially, of buying the best-quality goods that one can afford. The result, after decades of Horatio Alger–like self-improvement, hard work and voracious book-learning, was a chain of restaurants that went West with the Army and the railroads. As Fried (Husbandry: Sex, Love & Dirty Laundry—Inside the Minds of Married Men, 2007, etc.) notes, it was through Harvey’s labors that travelers beyond the Mississippi could get a decent, often excellent, meal. “He suspected there was money to be made if he could just figure out a way to dependably deliver palatable food at fair prices without any bait and switch,” writes the author. And so Harvey did. He brought in fresh steaks, eggs and bread by the boxcar, hired vivacious “Harvey Girls” to wait tables, imported chefs from Europe, set in motion the international trade in Native-American crafts and made piles of money while retaining his fundamental decency. Fried’s immensely readable narrative stretches from Harvey’s time into the empire as run by his children and grandchildren, a slow decline that proves the rule that family-run enterprises seldom last more than three generations—and are almost certainly looted and left for dead by the time the great-grandchildren come along.
A sturdy, detailed work of history that will appeal to business readers as well as aficionados of railroading and the Old West.Pub Date: April 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-553-80437-9
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
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
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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