A chorus of candid, emotional, and often moving testimonies.
An oral history traces the life of an iconic American play.
Tony Kushner’s Angels in America won accolades when it opened on Broadway in 1993, winning a Pulitzer Prize, many Tony awards, and critical acclaim. In their debut book, theater director Butler and Slate writer Kois gather the voices of 250 actors, directors, producers, critics, audience members, and historians—and Kushner himself—to tell the story of that momentous play and its dramatic context. A rich historical resource, the book chronicles the emergence of AIDS and the nation’s changing attitudes toward homosexuality from 1978 to 2018, when Angels is set to be revived yet again. Each of five sections opens with a timeline, beginning with the assassination of gay rights activist Harvey Milk and progressing through the election of Ronald Reagan, the Army’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, and the Supreme Court judgment making gay marriage legal in all states. Contributors include many of the actors in the original production and some (like Marcia Gay Harden) who performed over the years. Meryl Streep, who performed in the HBO production in 2003, remarked on the play’s immediate impact: “I’ve seen lots of performances that surprised me in the theater but this was on a scale—with ambition and imagination—that was unlike anything I’d ever seen.” It was, she added later, “the Hamilton of its time.” In his review, New York Times critic Frank Rich wrote that the play “speaks so powerfully because something far larger and more urgent than the future of the theater is at stake. It really is history that Mr. Kushner intends to crack open.” Despite the praise and awards, Kushner himself never quite believed his fame. In an interview with journalist Susan Cheever, he expressed worry that if a new play failed, he would “just be back to writing little plays for tiny little theaters.” She assured him that would never happen: “You’ve gone over to the other side now. You’ll always have done this thing and it’s permanent.”
A chorus of candid, emotional, and often moving testimonies.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63557-176-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
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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