What’s gained here is the pleasure of watching exemplary reporting illuminate a fascinating crossroads of American popular...
On the hundredth anniversary of the naming of Times Square, journalist Traub (City on a Hill, 1994, etc.) traces the colorful history of America’s premier theater district and appraises its most recent makeover by Disney and other global corporate brands.
From the days of Diamond Jim Brady and George M. Cohan in the 1910s through the reign of Irving Berlin in the ’50s, Times Square was both a veritable factory of theatrical magic and a real-estate mogul’s dream. Ever-changing and ever-increasing in value, its restaurants, arcades, theaters, and flashing billboards were a beacon to the world. The Great White Way always also had a seamy side; Traub quotes Jack Kerouac to the effect that it is the natural home of both the gentleman in the well-cut suit and the drunk in the gutter. By the ’70s, the drunk—and the drug dealers, pimps, and porno houses—had won the day and driven out all but the most persistent suits. At that point, the real-estate interests rose up in a bid to reclaim their lost cash cow. Traub trenchantly examines the warring commercial and government factions that at first promoted reconstruction, then stymied it for 20 years, and finally created what critics describe as a brand-name theme park ringed by outsized office buildings, again a real-estate mogul’s dream. The author visits the participating moguls, the corporate brand managers (including the boosterish head of the world’s largest Toys ’R’ Us), the famous architects and hip billboard designers, the theater owners, the street people, and the few remaining proponents of arcade games and experimental theater (including the rebellious daughter of Times Square tower builder Douglas Durst), to tell us what’s been gained and what’s been lost.
What’s gained here is the pleasure of watching exemplary reporting illuminate a fascinating crossroads of American popular art and commerce.Pub Date: March 23, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-50788-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2004
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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