A genial historical tour conducted by an affectionate docent with a keen eye and an admiring though sometimes-admonitory...
A freelance journalist specializing in architecture debuts with a general architectural history of one of the world’s most intriguing cities.
Gardner, once the art critic for the New York Post, first visited Buenos Aires in 1999 and fell in love with the architectural diversity of the city. He acknowledges that his is not a scholarly approach, but it’s evident throughout that he has done a scholar’s homework. The author does some expected things—e.g., writing about the geographical and geological history of the pampas and a bit about the political history of the city, which both caused and is reflected by many of the city’s structures. Gardner notes that the city’s flatness encouraged the earliest settlers to lay out a strict grid with wide streets, an outline that remains. Proceeding chronologically, the author includes numerous photographs (readers will wish for more—and for city maps, which are oddly absent). His approach is generally more expository that judgmental, though he does not hesitate to praise the beautiful and disdain the less so, and he reserves some special venom for the historical period (last century) when dictators ruled and misruled. He necessarily deals with some economic history, as well, noting the slave markets from centuries past and showing how the country’s economy accelerated when refrigerated shipping made possible the lucrative trade in cattle. He also shows Argentina and its capital as hosts to myriads of immigrants. Although the author discusses some architectural terminology—beaux-arts, modernism, and the brutalist style—he is careful to explain and to give examples. At one point, commenting on the architectural beauty of much of the city, he comments that even the brothels were stylish. He describes waterfront development, the arrival of the railroad, and the building of the marginally necessary subway.
A genial historical tour conducted by an affectionate docent with a keen eye and an admiring though sometimes-admonitory message.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1137279880
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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