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A HISTORY OF LONDON

Name: A HISTORY OF LONDON
Author: Stephen Inwood
ISBN: 0-7867-0613-9

by Stephen Inwood ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1999

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An accurate and capably told history of London, thoroughly researched and presented in exhaustive detail. Inwood, a principal lecturer in history at England’s Thames Valley University, begins his economic and social history with London’s founding as an outpost of the Roman Empire and continues to the present. He is chiefly concerned with where and how Londoners worked and led their daily lives. Ideally situated geographically, London has always been most important as a center of trade and commerce. It has also served as a social, cultural, religious, and intellectual center, providing its citizens with stimulation that could be found nowhere else in the British realm. The author’s main focus is on the various trades, professions, and social groups, their interactions with one another, the Crown, and the local government as embodied in the city’s aldermen and lord mayor. London’s frequent transformations in building and design have been due chiefly to the devastating fires that have wreaked temporary havoc on its landscape. Key to the city’s eminence, as well as to its steady population growth through WWII, has been the large numbers of foreigners who made it cosmopolitan even in the Middle Ages. Although London’s significance to Britain’s history cannot be overstated, Inwood tends to understate it by losing sight of the context in which London’s history has occurred. This shortcoming makes the book a hard read. Better maps would have made the overwhelming detail more intelligible, and a summing up at the end of chapters or sections would have helped give relevance to the multitudinous facts. In all, though, Inwood makes use of the most recent material available, including new archaeological finds, and gives us a reliable sourcebook to which we can turn with confidence when needed. (32 pages b&w illustrations, 10 maps) (Book-of-the- Month/History Book Club selection)

Pub Date: May 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-7867-0613-9

Page Count: 1136

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999

Categories:

HISTORY | WORLD | GENERAL NONFICTION

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SLEEPERS

by Lorenzo Carcaterra ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 10, 1995

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An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)

Pub Date: July 10, 1995

ISBN: 0-345-39606-5

Page Count: 432

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
NONNA MARIA AND THE CASE OF THE LOST TREASURE
by Lorenzo Carcaterra

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NONNA MARIA AND THE CASE OF THE STOLEN NECKLACE
by Lorenzo Carcaterra

- BOOK REVIEW
THREE DREAMERS
by Lorenzo Carcaterra

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DRAFT NO. 4

ON THE WRITING PROCESS

by John McPhee ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 5, 2017

A superb book about doing his job by a master of his craft.

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The renowned writer offers advice on information-gathering and nonfiction composition.

The book consists of eight instructive and charming essays about creating narratives, all of them originally composed for the New Yorker, where McPhee (Silk Parachute, 2010, etc.) has been a contributor since the mid-1960s. Reading them consecutively in one volume constitutes a master class in writing, as the author clearly demonstrates why he has taught so successfully part-time for decades at Princeton University. In one of the essays, McPhee focuses on the personalities and skills of editors and publishers for whom he has worked, and his descriptions of those men and women are insightful and delightful. The main personality throughout the collection, though, is McPhee himself. He is frequently self-deprecating, occasionally openly proud of his accomplishments, and never boring. In his magazine articles and the books resulting from them, McPhee rarely injects himself except superficially. Within these essays, he offers a departure by revealing quite a bit about his journalism, his teaching life, and daughters, two of whom write professionally. Throughout the collection, there emerge passages of sly, subtle humor, a quality often absent in McPhee’s lengthy magazine pieces. Since some subjects are so weighty—especially those dealing with geology—the writing can seem dry. There is no dry prose here, however. Almost every sentence sparkles, with wordplay evident throughout. Another bonus is the detailed explanation of how McPhee decided to tackle certain topics and then how he chose to structure the resulting pieces. Readers already familiar with the author’s masterpieces—e.g., Levels of the Game, Encounters with the Archdruid, Looking for a Ship, Uncommon Carriers, Oranges, and Coming into the Country—will feel especially fulfilled by McPhee’s discussions of the specifics from his many books.

A superb book about doing his job by a master of his craft.