Readers won’t be laughing: The Garden State doesn’t smell too sweet here.
A pair of seasoned investigative reporters catalogue New Jersey’s epic political dishonesty.
Gannett Newspapers Trenton bureau chief Ingle and veteran journalist McClure (Christie Whitman for the People, 1996) demonstrate that, for Garden State pols, there is indeed such a thing as a free lunch—with lots of gravy. They point to the appointed culprits who administer the state’s medical school, the thieves who manage various school districts, the municipalities carrying costly double dippers, long-dead pensioners and unborn employees. Law enforcement is selective, the authors note, with bench and bar contaminated by patronage. As far as the mob is concerned, ethnicity, gender and political affiliation matter not at all. Chiefly by recapping their own investigative articles, Ingle and McClure present a cheerless story of oligarchy and kleptocracy covering the length of the Turnpike from Cape May to Fort Lee, the executive mansion in Princeton to the statehouse in Trenton, horse country and the Pineys, Sinatra’s native turf in Hoboken and Joe Piscopo’s down at the shore. They nail the backroom intrigues in impressive scope and detail. Only occasionally do they weaken their case with faulty evidence, as when they base their claim that there are too many government workers on the national average per square mile, rather than on population; New Jersey is the most densely populated state. The authors close with a few suggestions for improvement.
Readers won’t be laughing: The Garden State doesn’t smell too sweet here.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-36894-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2007
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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