A lucid account of the human and economic factors that drove a notorious land rush.
A well-told history of the 1920s Florida land rush, the developers who fueled it, and an environmentalist who saw its dangers.
Writers like Erik Larson and Gary Krist have found a sturdy formula for enlivening history: Take a neglected or misunderstood era or incident, ferret out its colorful heroes and scoundrels, and show not just their successes or failures, but the social forces that shaped their lives. Former Fortune magazine London bureau chief Knowlton (Cattle Kingdom: The Hidden History of the Cowboy West, 2017, etc.) uses the method to fine effect in his story of a land-buying frenzy that led one observer to note, “All of America’s gold rushes, all her oil booms, and all her free-land stampedes dwindled by comparison with the torrent of migration pouring into Florida.” The author begins with Henry Flagler (1830-1913), the patriarch of Florida resort development, but moves on quickly to the architects and developers who drove the 1920s rush, including Addison Mizner in Palm Beach, George Merrick in Coral Gables, and David Paul “D.P.” Davis in Tampa. Perhaps no man was more flamboyant or controversial than Carl Fisher, who dredged Biscayne Bay for the sand needed to build Miami Beach and whose razzle-dazzle publicity efforts fed the boom and its collapse, owing to factors that included rampant overleveraging and the hurricanes of 1926 and 1928. Fisher had a small elephant who caddied for visiting President Warren G. Harding and hired black laborers who couldn’t live in his subdivisions: “The so-called Caucasian clause in the deeds prohibited anyone but a white person from buying a parcel of land on the island.” The writer Marjory Stoneman Douglas saw the injustices to blacks and the environmental risks of overdevelopment and later wrote the nature classic The Everglades: The River of Grass (1947). In an especially strong chapter, Knowlton argues cogently that while the collapse of the bubble alone didn’t cause the Great Depression, “the Sunshine State did provide both the dynamite and the detonator.”
A lucid account of the human and economic factors that drove a notorious land rush.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982128-37-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
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 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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