Those who’ve seen the Catskills will love how the authors capture its magic. Those who haven’t will start planning a trip.
A history that demonstrates “the color, charm, and even lunacy that for the past four hundred years have characterized the Catskill Mountains and the people attracted to them.”
Silverman (David Lean, 1992, etc.) and the late Silver (Congregation, 2014) stress the enormous influence of Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle and Sleepy Hollow, which invented a place of imagination for artists, painters, and essayists. Among those were America’s first novelist, James Fenimore Cooper, whose Leatherstocking Tales enlightened Europeans and Americans of the beauty of the Catskills region; and Thomas Cole, the leader of the Hudson River School, who claimed that in America, all nature is new to art. In 1807, Robert Fulton’s steamship, the Clermont, sailed from New York to Albany, further opening the area to travel. At first, industry such as tanning and bluestone mining took hold, followed by the arrival of migrants looking for a homestead. Unfortunately for the immigrants, the feudal practice of leasehold under the post-revolutionary landlords was too much. In the 1830s, the “rent wars” began, causing widespread evictions and forced sale of belongings. In addition to a host of other colorful characters, the authors point out two boyhood friends who traveled widely different paths: railroad tycoon Jay Gould and naturalist John Burroughs. One sought to protect the area, while the other exploited it. The railroads brought increasing numbers of visitors, and wealthy New Yorkers established large, restricted resorts, tuberculosis sanatoriums, and boardinghouses like that of the Grossingers. All of these expanded with the arrival of the automobile. Eventually, as the authors engagingly chronicle, the New York syndicate made up of Sicilian and Jewish gangsters discovered the fine hiding places of the area. As the days of the big resorts ebbed, the Arts and Crafts movement grew up around Woodstock, morphing into the hippie movement and the rise of folk music.
Those who’ve seen the Catskills will love how the authors capture its magic. Those who haven’t will start planning a trip.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-307-27215-7
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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 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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