Not a conventional championship-season kind of treatment but a thoughtful, comprehensive, and even deeply personal account...
The late-1970s Los Angeles Dodgers are a not-so-distant window through which we can view American culture, then and now.
Fallon, who has published previously about the cultural scene in the City of Angels during the same epoch (Creating the Future: Art and Los Angeles in the 1970s, 2014), weaves several stories into his attractive tapestry: the story of his grandfather’s economic rise and fall, Mayor Tom Bradley’s ultimately successful bid to bring the 1984 Olympic Games to LA, the various struggles of writer Tom Wolfe (to understand the quickly changing culture, to write The Right Stuff) and, principally, the Dodgers’ 1977-1978 seasons, both of which resulted in World Series losses to the reviled Yankees. Within the Dodgers’ larger story, Fallon tells many smaller ones—e.g., the managing styles and troubles of new manager Tommy Lasorda, the contentious pitcher Don Sutton, the all-American (and, later, tainted) image of hitting star Steve Garvey (who ended up in a famous locker-room brawl with Sutton), the vicissitudes of outfielder Rick Monday. Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson both shines and fades. The author continually takes us away from the ballpark, as well, to remind us of the popular movies (Star Wars and Jaws among them), music (Frank Zappa, the Bee Gees), and TV shows (Three’s Company). In this ambitious and thoroughly researched account, we learn about the economic woes of the era—the author examines Proposition 13—the political figures, including President Jimmy Carter, and so much more (Hugh Hefner). Although Fallon’s account races at times, especially during some Dodgers’ play-by-play sections, he sometimes allows his diction to slide into cliché—in one brief section, we get sea changes and watershed moments and writing on the wall.
Not a conventional championship-season kind of treatment but a thoughtful, comprehensive, and even deeply personal account of a boisterous era whose echoes remain loud, even painful.Pub Date: June 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8032-4940-0
Page Count: 468
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
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
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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