And “if I die tomorrow, Provincetown is where I want my ashes scattered.” That's a sense of place called home.
A leisurely walking tour and shrewd exposition of that “eccentrics' sanctuary”—Provincetown, Massachusetts—from Pulitzer-winning novelist Cunningham (The Hours, 1998, etc.).
It sits out in the Atlantic, the barb on Cape Cod's hook, a slip of land “that unfurls like a genie's shoe from the coastline of Massachusetts.” Only three miles long and a couple blocks wide, Provincetown is a world unto itself, intriguingly rendered by Cunningham. He takes his tour guide's responsibility seriously and eagerly, wanting readers to get both the grand and intimate view, animate, inanimate, and subanimate. He describes the wild swings of weather: bleached in August, the fog-muted greens of spring, winter revealing the “dreadful, rock-hard opulence of the world, that which remains when idealism and sentimentality have fallen away.” There are sturdy Baedekers to Long Point and the salt Marsh, the spare tranquility of Hatches Cove, the potent mysteriousness of Snail Road, Herring Cove's nude beach with its “unique opportunity to understand that the female breast is among the more profoundly variable of human wonders.” There is the undeniable sexuality of the place, gay and straight, “an improved version of the world at large, aversion in which sexuality, though always important, is not much of a deciding factor,” where “the Log Cabin Republican not only can't ignore the existence of stone butches but buys his coffee from one every morning.” Cunningham introduces its cast of refugees, rebels, and visionaries—from Mayflower Pilgrims to Robert Motherwell to the lady who walks only backwards—attracted by the exoticism and low rents (or, as viably, low-rent exoticism), and there are everyday notes on the pharmacy and A&P, the places where you can pee without having to buy something, the centers of buxom tawdriness, the Portuguese influence, the miraculous pleasures of watching whales, “green in the blue-green water, shadowy as an X-ray, netted with pallid light.”
And “if I die tomorrow, Provincetown is where I want my ashes scattered.” That's a sense of place called home.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-609-60907-6
Page Count: 176
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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