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
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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