Altogether, a compelling portrait of New York and a must-read for residents and visitors alike.
A lively portrait of a city in constant transformation.
“Even if, statistically, New York was now smaller than Baoding and Tianjin and Hyderabad and many others, it still overwhelmed in its old familiar ways.” So writes Canadian transplant Taylor in this fine and fearless follow-up to Londoners (2013)—fine because it’s so thoughtful and revealing, fearless because the author’s method is to engage strangers in conversation that quickly becomes oral history. “So, are you looking for boldface names?” asks one woman, to which another interlocutor says, “No, he’s looking for the lightly italicized.” No matter the typeface and/or whether rich or poor, New Yorkers have a common fixation: money. One rapper exalts, “I mean, New York, New York, man, dollar slices.” If one could live on dollar slices alone, that’d be fine, but as a personal assistant to a chain of idle-rich people remarks, “The wealthy in New York—what they’re buying is time and so they don’t care,” particularly about how others’ time is spent waiting on them. A well-to-do worker in the financial sector says he wouldn’t want to raise a family in the city, citing a boss who says it costs him $25,000 per month to live comfortably there. One of Taylor’s subjects recounts time on Rikers Island; a blind man tells him about the smell of sex that used to pervade the air around the Port Authority bus terminal; a car thief instructs him in the art of evading police; and a sometimes-homeless man teaches him about the “three to four degrees of homelessness” that beset those down on their luck. “New York isn’t a real place,” complains one weary soul, while another, recently arrived from Arkansas, says, “I feel like I’m in a movie….I feel like it’s going to be a happy ending.”
Altogether, a compelling portrait of New York and a must-read for residents and visitors alike.Pub Date: March 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-393-24232-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
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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