Sometimes arid, but with insights into the growth and evolution of Irish America.
A scholarly history of 19th-century Irish immigration to New York City, and from there to points far inland.
Anbinder writes that while Irish immigrants to New York in the years around the Potato Famine were not as poor as they’ve been portrayed, only “four in ten managed to improve their standing in the socio-economic hierarchy over the course of their lifetimes.” While 40% may not be the most sparkling record, the author later qualifies his remarks with the perhaps self-evident observation that those who landed with useful trades did better on the whole than those who became street sweepers and junk sellers. It wasn’t all beer and skittles, then, but it wasn’t all Five Points and cholera-ridden tenements, either. Anbinder notes that about three-quarters of the 1.3 million Irish to arrive in the U.S. during and immediately after the Potato Famine landed in New York—but most of them pushed on, and some of the most interesting episodes in this rather formless narrative center on immigrants who made their way to California. Anbinder is good at reading the statistics, working with both digital tools and a vast archive of documentary materials. Using those resources, he ferrets out such things as the gradual Irish dominance of the New York police force, fueled by the fact that apart from giving authority to the previously disempowered, “police work paid better than unskilled work and almost every kind of artisanal labor.” Another lucrative line of work was owning a saloon, and both the police and the alcohol connections have explanatory powers in the New York of today. For all the statistics and social-historical insights, though, the book could have used more vigorous storytelling along the lines of Sean Connolly’s On Every Tide.
Sometimes arid, but with insights into the growth and evolution of Irish America.Pub Date: March 12, 2024
ISBN: 9780316564809
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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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