Engaging social history by a talented scholar with a distinct gift for narrative.
A narrative of financial chicanery and real-estate flimflam that foreshadows our own times.
Kamensky (History/Brandeis Univ.; Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England, 1997, etc.) returns to prominence the once-notorious speculator Andrew Dexter Jr. (1779–1837), a pioneer currency trader and prototypical hedge-fund operator. Always well-leveraged, Dexter laundered and watered money—at one point he issued $600,000 in notes that were backed by only $86 of actual specie. In a time when banks could independently emit currency, he established bogus depositories as distant as a thousand miles from his Boston base, the better to dispense worthless paper at home. A striver who had Gilbert Stuart paint a portrait he couldn’t pay for, reckless and feckless Dexter triggered the young country’s first banking collapse in 1809. He wasn’t entirely sinister, however; all he wanted was to build the biggest building on the continent, and he didn’t mind financing it with subprime mortgages. Often compared to the tower of Babel, the gigantic Exchange Coffee House, “a seven-story structure in a three-story town,” was designed to be a bourse, hotel, coffeehouse and office building. Containing more than 150 rooms, a vast trading floor and an atrium, capped by a tin dome, it rose to change Boston’s skyline. But just as it opened, Dexter’s financial pyramid collapsed, and he fled the country. His combustible skyscraper lasted only a decade, succumbing to a spectacular fire in 1818. (The hand-pumped water couldn’t reach the flames on the upper floors.) What happened to the builder and defaulter? Dexter returned to the United States to found Montgomery, Ala., then died bankrupt.
Engaging social history by a talented scholar with a distinct gift for narrative.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-670-01841-3
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2007
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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