Unfailingly entertaining.
Two-time Pulitzer nominee Blum (The Eve of Destruction, 2003, etc.) cinematically explores the 1910 dynamiting of the Los Angeles Times building.
The fierce fighting between labor and capital at the turn of the 20th century was especially intense in Los Angeles. Times publisher Otis Chandler was a bitter opponent of unions. Brothers J.J. and J.B. McNamara, both labor activists, were involved in a nationwide terror campaign that culminated in the firebombing of the Times headquarters and 21 deaths. Summoned west to solve the case, the country’s most famous detective, William J. Burns, spent six months investigating and then arrested the McNamaras and a confederate, Ortie McManigal, who promptly confessed. Clarence Darrow, the era’s foremost defense attorney, reluctantly undertook the McNamaras’ defense. In luminous detail, Blum interweaves the stories of Burns and Darrow, leaving room for memorable walk-ons by labor leader Samuel Gompers, flamboyant attorney Earl Rogers, movie star Mary Pickford and muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens. Remarkably enough, Steffens’s pro-labor battle cry—“justifiable dynamiting”—actually helped fashion a plea bargain in the case, whose political and economic ramifications were too great for either side to stomach an outright loss. The relevance to this drama of Blum’s third major character, pioneering filmmaker D.W. Griffith, is not immediately apparent. Eventually, however, the author justifies Griffith’s role in his text by demonstrating how the director’s early films moved progressively toward the sort of socially important statement the McNamara case in all its dimensions embodied. The nascent motion-picture industry, Blum suggests, could capture in a new and powerful way the staggering cultural dimensions of this political and legal brawl. The author’s eye for scene-setting and subtle explication perfectly mimics a Griffith-style camera. Blum is at his best when exploring the motivations, the genius and the deep flaws of his three principals, men who occupied the same room only once in their lives, but who are memorably linked in this book.
Unfailingly entertaining.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-34694-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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