Valuable lessons for students of urban design and planning as well as local governance.
Four-time Oklahoma City mayor Cornett sees a promising future for America’s flyover cities, some of them places that you might not expect.
Associated with a notorious bombing and tornadoes, among other noted negatives, Oklahoma City isn’t a garden-spot destination of the sort that travel agents tout. But not so fast: Cornett, a former TV news personality, recounts a long and successful campaign to undo some of the unpromising elements of the economically sleepy city. The campaign involved considerable planning built around themes that now seem common-sensical but took some selling to pull off, including the notion that “moving the city from a good place to a great city would depend on our ability to connect.” That connection is not merely rhetorical, but instead literal: Vibrant cities are easy to move around in, with sidewalks, bicycle paths, streetcar and light rail lines, pedestrian trails, and other corridors serving transportation by various means. Other ingredients include civic pride–building institutions such as schools, libraries, and sports venues, though he cautions with the last against giving away the farm in order to recruit teams, citing Sacramento’s program to build a new stadium with the team paying for “overruns or delays in construction.” Of particular interest is Cornett’s account of how he persuaded his fellow citizens to lose a collective million pounds in order to remove OKC from the list of America’s fattest cities—no easy task given that there were twice as many Taco Bells, by his reckoning, in his city than in the five boroughs of New York. The author won’t win any awards for his prose—“well, I’m here to tell you that the middle is actually a great place to be”; “there we were, right near the top. OMG”—but his achievements are real: OKC has undeniably risen in stature, and other “middle” cities of the heartland have done the same.
Valuable lessons for students of urban design and planning as well as local governance.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-57509-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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 Yorkerstaff 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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
