Brief and memorable epitomes of the urban encounter: a transporting collection.
Sixty vignettes of life in New York City both before and after the Twin Towers went south with its heart-breaking charge
Most of this material first saw the light of day on mrbellersneighborhood.com, fiction-writer Beller’s Web site whose stated aim is “to provide a venue for pieces with no pitch, no angle. This site makes the neighborhood, and the individual, the angle.” The pieces that fit with this premise are well considered and fresh—but fresh like the fruit at a high-end market. The experiences they chronicle are well lived, though young. It’s evident in the pre-9/11 work that the writers knew they were onto something good, fleeting, and worth the telling. The mood here is, of course, more whimsical and no less genuine for it: there are stories of a choice barber and the sensual semiotics of socks, of a park riot, a New Year’s Eve kiss with a cab driver, and of a guy who doesn’t really know how to fix a building’s furnace. A few are precious (“There was a time, not long ago, when turtles enjoyed a brief vogue in New York City”), but by and large each story behaves like a crab apple: Bite into it and it bites you back. These experiences and their tellers seem old beyond their years, and many pack a hurtful punch. All of the post-9/11 works hurt, yet in their newness, and despite their subject, they don’t quite leave the lasting imagery that the earlier material does. (Maybe it’s just more sustaining to reflect upon memories of Tom’s Restaurant than to dwell on Don DeLillo as a guide to the near future.) The writing is raw, and the best comes from longtime residents like Philip Lopate, who remembers of the WTC, “the more you looked at it, the less it gave you back.”
Brief and memorable epitomes of the urban encounter: a transporting collection.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2002
ISBN: 0-393-32353-6
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
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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