A captivating if necessarily fragmented look at an American institution. (50 b&w illustrations)
Essays, excerpts, snippets, and snapshots of the Street, from 1670 to 2000.
Colbert presents the third of his “eyewitness” volumes (Eyewitness to the American West, 1998, etc.), and again offers a large chorus of voices (more than 80) singing about Wall Street with useful commentary by the editor. The performers range from Andrew Jackson (closing the Second Bank of the United States) to Andrew Carnegie (lining up investors for a bridge) to Charlie Chaplin (selling Liberty Bonds) to Christopher Buckley and Art Buchwald (waxing wise on investment vagaries) to Louis Rukeyser (providing the last words: “It’s just your money, not your life”). So many are the soloists that Colbert sometimes loses track of who’s sung what, so a cute quotation from H.G. Wells appears thrice. And readers may wonder why two personal essays by a journalist-cum-online-trader get nine pages, while the Crash of 1929 gets only four. Still, there is as much fascination as information here. A 1670 visitor noted Wall Street’s prominent gallows and whipping post—items perhaps once again needed, to judge from the accounts of the dark doings of Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky (few of the excerpts here are creepier than the transcript of Boesky’s 1990 testimony). An observer of Street-types during the Panic of 1857 noted a still-familiar sight in times of stock-stress: “People's faces in Wall Street look fearfully gaunt and desperate.” More amusing is a little piece by Harpo (not Karl) Marx about accepting investment tips from an elevator operator, and there is an especially eerie news item concerning the bombing of Morgan Bank on September 16, 1920: the bomber left a horse-drawn cart filled with explosives in front of the bank. And in his introduction of pioneer Muriel Siebert, Colbert cracks, “Wall Street was never an exclusive men’s club; it was a locker room.”
A captivating if necessarily fragmented look at an American institution. (50 b&w illustrations)Pub Date: May 15, 2001
ISBN: 0-7679-0660-8
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
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 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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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