Standout account of the tight 1949 American League pennant race between the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees, by the author of The Reckoning, The Best and the Brightest, etc. This is baseball just before its 1950's heyday: radio linked the nation, blacks entered the game, the legendary Yankee/Red Sox rivalry entered a new era as the extraordinary Joe DiMaggio neared retirement and Ted Williams ("the philosopher-king of hitting") stormed the record books. Halberstam does a splendid job of catching the quirks of these two giants: Williams' overblown ego ("No one could throw a fastball past me. God could come down from Heaven, and He couldn't throw it past me") and computerlike brain; DiMaggio's painful shyness and doelike grace. Other players, too, flourish in capsule bio graphics: klutzy Yogi Berra; Ellis Kinder, known to play while skunk-drunk; Casey Stengel, baseball's greatest practical joker; Johnny Pesky, Phil Rizutto, Bobby Doerr. This assembly of oddballs produces one of the game's greatest pennant races, as the Red Sox sprint from behind to catch the Yankees at the end of September. The season boils down to the final game of the year, each team putting a 96-57 record on the line. Halberstam keeps the tension high and the human element foremost. His one misstep is the considerable space he devotes to discussing the baseball announcers and journalists of the era—dead weight for most fans. On the other hand, A. Bartlett Giamatti makes a delightful cameo appearance as an 11-year-old Red Sox booster. Such unexpected touches—Halberstam's eye for the exemplary detail—help make this a baseball book to cherish.
Pub Date: May 15, 1989
ISBN: 0060884266
Page Count: 364
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1989
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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