Informative, racy and fun, but lacks the heft of a serious historical study.
Sassy celebration of the talented dames and gents who invented equal-opportunity Manhattan sophistication.
New Yorker and New York Times contributor and Broadway-musical maven Mordden (Ziegfield: The Man Who Invented Show Business, 2008, etc.) whisks readers through five crucial decades—1920s to ’60s—of New York’s golden era, when cultural refinement began to free itself from the shackles of aristocratic pedigree. The author writes with zesty society-page cattiness about a wide variety of characters, including Edna Ferber, Dorothy Parker and other members of the Algonquin Round Table, hedonistic mayor Jimmy Walker, journalist and cultural power broker Walter Winchell, political columnist Dorothy Thompson, Cole Porter, Josephine Baker, Irving Berlin, John O’Hara and Truman Capote, among numerous others. The major thematic string tying all these pivotal figures together is Mordden’s concept of “New Yorkism,” which refers to an original multicultural melding of people and ideas—often thanks to gay, Jewish or African-American sources—whose collective exoticism helped make Manhattan into the cultural Mecca by the early to mid-20th century despite Middle America’s distrustful gaze. Mordden also gives ample space to the conservative front that opposed this culturally diverse scene: Neo-Nazi aviator Charles Lindbergh, The Stork Club’s Sherman Billingsley, Elsa Maxwell and others. Unfortunately, because achievement for nonaristocrats required a cutthroat ambition and ruthless self-preservation instinct, many of the author’s main subjects died alienated and alone. The author obviously has a few soft spots for Capote and the lavish Manhattan soirees that gave him the social prominence his own personality couldn’t, yet Mordden never considers the possibility that these indulgent parties eventually ruined Capote as a working writer. Then again, the author is more concerned with the lifestyle these artists and writers created for themselves than with the cultural products associated with their names.
Informative, racy and fun, but lacks the heft of a serious historical study.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-54024-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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
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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