Intoxicating.
Both a rollicking recap of the Roaring ’20s and a cautionary tale about how a government’s attempts to legislate and monitor morality are nearly always doomed.
Book- and magazine-publishing veteran Okrent (Public Editor #1: The Collected Columns (with Reflections, Reconsiderations, and Even a Few Retractions) of the First Ombudsman of The New York Times, 2006, etc.)—former editor-at-large of Time, Inc., and managing editor of Time and an editor at Knopf, Viking and Harcourt—joined forces early with filmmaker Ken Burns, and his new book will be prominently featured in a 2011 Ken Burns/Lynn Novick documentary about Prohibition. The author assembles a phenomenal cast of characters who emerged during Prohibition’s conception, birth, swift life and death. Evangelist Billy Sunday, P.T. Barnum, Jack London, hatchet-wielding Carry Nation, Wayne Wheeler (of the Anti-Saloon League), Jane Addams, Warren G. Harding, Andrew Mellon, Eliot Ness, Al Capone, Andrew John Volstead and countless others strutted across the stage and then, frequently, disappeared. Okrent muses about the evanescent fame/notoriety of Wheeler, for example, who for a time made Senators tremble and was among the most powerful men in America—but who’s heard of him now? The author skips around the country to examine the vast dimensions of the crime, corruption and plain disregard for the law that ensued when the 18th Amendment went into effect in January 1920. Liquor flowed in from Canada; entrepreneurs took drinkers on long Caribbean cruises; mom and pop got prescriptions for “medicinal” alcohol from physicians benefitting from kickbacks; racism and xenophobia reigned; Catholic churches and other religious institutions suddenly needed much more wine for rituals; and brewers and blenders tried near-beers and grape juices. In addition, the tax coffers emptied while gangsters bathed in liquidity. It took the Depression to help end it all—and the pervasive realization that only criminals were winning. Okrent’s style is bracing and wry, his research is vast and impressive and his insight is penetrating.
Intoxicating.Pub Date: May 11, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-7432-7702-0
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
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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