Well-documented account of Washington Square and its vicissitudes, useful for park planners, Greenwich Village buffs, and,...
A detailed history of Washington Square Park, the heart of Greenwich Village, that reflects its growth and change from farmland to the elite enclave described by Henry James and Edith Wharton to the present dominance of New York University.
Washington Square Park is not the largest or even the most beautiful of Manhattan's parks, but its neighbors and users have fought long, exhausting, expensive battles with developers and city government to preserve what they believe is its unique neighborhood quality. Kies, a lecturer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, begins in the 18th century, when farms in the area gave way to summer homes. To the dismay of the homeowners, the area destined to be Washington Square was commandeered as a burial ground for yellow-fever victims. In the early 19th century, in an effort to attract well-off taxpayers, the burial ground was landscaped and dubbed the “Washington Military Parade Ground. ” The maneuver paid off. The famous row of Greek Revival houses was built on the north side of the square in midcentury, the fountain was installed in 1852, and the Stanford White–designed arch was dedicated in 1895. New York's rich and poor shared the square, with the well-off on the north, poor immigrant communities in housing to the south, and artists, writers, and political activists in between. This disparate community successfully fought off the city's frequent attempted incursions on the park, including planning czar Robert Moses's decades-long efforts to modify the square. In the 1970s, drugs and crime threatened to overwhelm the area, as did NYU's determined expansion. Today both NYU and crime seem to be under control, and the park is widely used by all its neighbors. Numerous black and white drawings, maps, and photographs help track the changes.
Well-documented account of Washington Square and its vicissitudes, useful for park planners, Greenwich Village buffs, and, particularly, students of the politics of municipal planning.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-8018-7088-7
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
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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