An entertaining biography, step by step, of a diversion in the earliest days of today’s sports industry.
A lively account of America’s first major spectator sport, competitive walking, which attracted thousands in its day.
“It was like watching a NASCAR race in super-slow motion,” writes reporter Algeo (The President Is a Sick Man: Wherein the Supposedly Virtuous Grover Cleveland Survives a Secret Surgery at Sea and Vilifies the Courageous Newspaperman Who Dared Expose the Truth, 2011, etc.), “hypnotic, mesmerizing, with the promise of imminent catastrophe.” Competitive walking began when bookseller Ed Weston bet that he could walk from Boston to Washington, D.C., in 10 days to attend Abraham Lincoln’s first inauguration. He missed the president’s oath by a few hours, but his feat of footwork launched a new spectator sport. In epic rivalries, treks of more than 500 miles in six days (there were no competitions on the Sabbath) were common as pedestrians left the public roads and walked in circles in venues like the first Madison Square Garden. The mania to see competitive ambulation soon became a phenomenon in England, as well. While the American style demanded “fair heel and toe” (part of one foot on the track always), the Britons allowed “go as you please” (run if you like). However, sporadic runners usually could not keep up with steady walkers. Walking events spawned trainers, trading cards, endorsements, scalpers and, not surprising considering the betting, fixes. There were also widespread charges of doping—in particular, the chewing of coca leaves. Sportswriting flourished, and sports medicine was born. Women began walking, followed by African-American pedestrians. Soon, the clergy denounced the whole business. Ultimately, pedestrianism, an attraction of the Gilded Age, was replaced by six-day bicycle racing, boxing and the new national pastime, baseball. The world-class practitioners of the trudging art and their sport were soon forgotten. Algeo brings them back to life.
An entertaining biography, step by step, of a diversion in the earliest days of today’s sports industry.Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61374-397-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014
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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