A vivid history revealing hidden aspects of supposedly well-known events.
In which Mrs. O’Leary’s cow is cleared of all charges.
Chicago was not prepared for the conflagration that erupted on Oct. 8, 1871. Writes Smith, an emeritus professor of history at Northwestern, the city was barely 40 years old and had been constructed haphazardly, with wooden structures barely held together by a few nails and—as with the home of the Irish immigrant O’Leary family—set atop pilings rather than a foundation. The fire that began in their barn—no bovine agency involved—spread quickly, and it didn’t help that the city’s pumping station was one of the victims. The fire spoke not just to overcrowding, class divides, poverty, and poor building standards, but also to political corruption. Yet Chicago was also a city of economic promise. “The outbreak of the Crimean War in 1853 caused American wheat exports to double in volume and triple in value,” writes the author, and the more or less contemporaneous development of the transcontinental railroad, the grain elevator, and mass stockyards placed the port city in an enviable position. Chicago was able to rebuild, and fairly quickly, though it would be years before it had the solidity of stone and steel that characterizes it today. Smith unearths several interesting aspects of the great fire. One was the organization, around the country and world, of tremendous relief efforts—“even Richmond, Virginia, and other southern cities joined in, as did remote Santa Fe and even remoter Honolulu” along with magnates like J.P. Morgan and potentates like the emperor of Prussia. Another was the role of the fire in reshaping city politics, with reformers ousting the entrenched bosses and labor gaining a sense of its power through work stoppages and strikes for better pay and working conditions. The result, writes Smith in this fast-moving narrative, was a rapid expansion of an almost new city—though poor Catherine O’Leary still carries the blame and has been the fire’s “most enduring victim.”
A vivid history revealing hidden aspects of supposedly well-known events.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4810-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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