Readers nostalgic for California’s yesteryear or who wonder about the history behind their road maps should find plenty to...
A book provides a history of Highway 99, which ran from Mexico to Oregon and subtly transformed California.
The first part of this work lays out the history and development of the road and the cities it passed through. In the early 1910s, California sought to build standardized highways of a higher quality than the dirt roads that early motorists had to deal with. A number of early routes eventually were merged into Highway 99, which connected the southern and northern parts of the state, an achievement Provost (Fresno Growing Up, 2015) considers “just as illustrious” as the famed Route 66. In clear prose, the author describes in much detail the early challenges that the road builders faced in traversing the varied terrain of California, from tortuous mountain passes to flood-threatened lowlands. He also gives loads of vibrant background about the people of the area, from the farmland laborers of the Depression to the entrepreneurs who popped up on the roadside. Provost’s grasp of local color comes through in his choice of anecdotes; he picks out vivid and intriguing events to discuss the societal changes that the highway brought, such as the rise and fall of motels and roadside diners. These scenes, chock full of captivating characters from the road’s history, lift the book out of the highway minutiae—when it was built, when and where it was bypassed, etc.—that Provost occasionally gets lost in and which don’t have quite the same verve. The second part gives a short entry on every city and town along the road, from Calexico to Yreka, and information on where to see the remnants of the celebrated highway’s route. (Travelers now use the more efficient Interstate 5.) While some accounts merely give the history of how the town was named, others delve deeply into some particularly unusual part of the city, from the underground gardens of Fresno to the renowned date milkshakes of Thermal. Photos by Provost and from various archives are helpfully presented throughout.
Readers nostalgic for California’s yesteryear or who wonder about the history behind their road maps should find plenty to love in this work.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61035-296-3
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Craven Street Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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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