An unfailingly interesting, highly readable contribution to Starr’s grand series, which is drawing to a close. (Readers...
In which Starr brings his magnificent, multivolume series Americans and the California Dream, the product of a quarter-century of work, up to the present.
After all that time, Starr (The Dream Endures, 1997, etc.; History/Univ. of California, Los Angeles) admits, he had come to wonder whether he “had chosen a dead end. Was California an aberration, a sideshow, or, worse, a case study in how things could go wrong for the United States?” The events he covers here do not offer a powerful argument otherwise: the mass suicide of the Heaven’s Gate cult, the LA riots of 1992, the collapse of the public sector in the wake of taxpayer revolt, the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Things have always been different in California, Starr allows. Consider the cafeteria of religions, for example, about which he marvels early on: LA is a center for the New Age, but also for Hinduism, Mormonism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Pentecostalism, and Catholicism—and, on top of that, “the third largest Jewish community in the world.” But some recent trends have been both strange and unhealthy. One is a growing class division, manifested by laws that, for instance, make it impossible “for anyone other than the very wealthy to build on a restricted number of sites” near the ocean, even though access to the ocean was once one of the great democratic promises of California. Another is the rising tension between immigrants and natives, resulting in the phenomenon of “white flight” to neighboring states. Another is downwardly trending economy, for all those immigrants’ contributions to it. Still another, though perhaps curbed now, is the abrogation of public control to private interests that led to such things as the energy scandal: “The state preferred to let the boys from Texas do its dirty work, and Texas would soon be eating California’s lunch.” And so on. There’s plenty to be worried about, in other words, out there on the edge.
An unfailingly interesting, highly readable contribution to Starr’s grand series, which is drawing to a close. (Readers still have Starr’s take on the 1960s to look forward to; the next volume, he’s threatened, will be called Smoking the Dream.)Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2004
ISBN: 0-679-41288-3
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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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