Highly entertaining and instructive; destined to become a collector’s best friend.
A debut guide provides advice for both serious and casual collectors.
Antiques Roadshow and Pawn Stars, two TV series referenced by the author, have popularized collecting valuable, mostly old items. These shows are merely eye candy compared to this finely crafted book by Stewart, a certified appraiser with three decades of experience. Here, the author covers paintings, nostalgia, books, artifacts, and even bizarre collectibles (such as Kate Middleton’s wedding cake and Ronald Reagan’s blood) in an engaging format supplemented by lush color photography. Instead of conveying a dry how-to about acquiring, valuing, and selling collectibles, Stewart delivers numerous vignettes, each telling a tale, to demonstrate the relationship between collector and object. What’s more, every case study illustrates a different key point to elucidate aspects of an appraiser’s role. For example, one story about Paris street scenes concerns the “importance of researching a particular painting’s genre.” An engaging tale of old toys owned by such luminaries as Jonathan Winters “shines a light on both the value and provenance of celebrity-owned objects.” An intriguing vignette about the gift of an old letter proves that “research is so often the real key to unlocking an object’s value.” Clearly, Stewart is not just an appraiser and collector of objects herself, but a collector of collectors’ stories, which she shares with candor, humor, and grace (scrupulously protecting identities with the use of initials rather than names). In addition to her anecdotes, Stewart includes a whole section of “Tips” in her authoritative book, with chapters on purchasing and selling at auction, buying in an upmarket, bequeathing collectibles, assessing value, and getting rid of things. She also provides her take on “the best and worst collections owned by my clients,” a particularly charming chapter in which she rates various objects (“The second worst area is collector plates and no matter what Bradford Exchange may claim, they are not salable and will be buried with you!”). Confessing that she buys “mainly from thrift stores,” Stewart closes with a list of her own cherished collectibles “still living at Villa Elizabeth.”
Highly entertaining and instructive; destined to become a collector’s best friend.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Flandricka House Press
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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