Much of this ground has otherwise been covered, and better, in Greil Marcus’ Invisible Republic (1997). Still, fans of 1960s...
Veteran music writer Hoskyns (Led Zeppelin: The Oral History of the World's Greatest Rock Band, 2012, etc.) peels back the layers of a musical Shangri-La that has plenty of dark corners.
Woodstock, New York, has always seemed more a state of mind than an actual place, though an actual place it is—and, as the author writes early on, one well surrounded by a sense of reclusiveness and mystery, as if everyone there followed the Dylan-esque rule, “Don’t talk to anybody.” Much of Woodstock’s rise can be attributed to Dylan and his backup musicians, the ones who would become The Band and record some zeitgeist-shaping tunes at Big Pink. But more can be attributed to the much-despised music manager Albert Grossman (who “wasn’t a very nice man,” Mary Travers recalls, “but I loved him dearly”), who bought up a considerable chunk of the town with the proceeds of Dylan et al.’s artistry. In any event, as Hoskyns helpfully traces, Woodstock had been an art and music colony for generations. The best parts of this fluent narrative come when the author finds unusual intersections: a very young Patti Smith, for instance, hanging out with Todd Rundgren, himself engineering The Band’s most polished studio album, “Stage Fright.” The cast of characters is stellar, from Van Morrison, even more hermetic than Dylan, to the poet Ed Sanders, doomed blues rocker Janis Joplin, and hippie entrepreneur Michael Lang, and a 100 names between. There are a few clues (including chronological mismatches: Music from Big Pink is much closer to 50 than 30 years old now) to suggest that Hoskyns has bundled up old pieces and notes, but one can charitably surmise that this just means he’s been on the case for a long time.
Much of this ground has otherwise been covered, and better, in Greil Marcus’ Invisible Republic (1997). Still, fans of 1960s and ’70s rock and music history buffs will find this a pleasure.Pub Date: March 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-306-82320-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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