An animated history of an iconic destination.
How nostalgia, fantasy, and cutting-edge engineering merged into the “tireless commercial dynamo” of Disneyland.
For Snow (Iron Dawn: The Monitor, the Merrimack, and the Civil War Sea Battle That Changed History, 2016, etc.), former editor-in-chief of American Heritage magazine, a fascination with amusement parks began at Playland in Rye, New York, and intensified when he raptly watched Disneyland, a show airing weekly on ABC that whetted viewers’ appetite for Walt Disney’s ambitious project. When Snow finally visited, in 1959, at the age of 12, he arrived with high expectations that, he recalls happily, “were met and surpassed.” The author’s admiration for Disneyland infuses his brisk, thorough history of the huge theme park, from an idea conceived by “the powerful personality of one man” to its realization as a monument to “an America where all is prosperous and convivial”—a place, as writer Ray Bradbury commented, that “liberates men to their better selves.” Snow portrays Disney as a tireless and demanding boss who was “often dissatisfied with things as he found them; his preferences changed from day to day, sometimes from hour to hour.” He was a perfectionist determined to build his park no matter who (his brother, for example, who balked at the expense) or what (problems building a scale model of the Matterhorn, for one, and installing a jungle in arid California) got in the way of his dream: “something of a fair, an exhibition, a playground, a community center, a museum of living facts and a showplace of beauty and magic.” Snow chronicles in detail the process of finding a site (Anaheim, in southern California); hiring engineers, designers, architects, landscapers, artists, and an ever increasing number of genial, polite staff; building the park’s structures and rides; planning for visitors’ movements through the park, expenditures, and needs such as water, toilets, and food; dealing with unions’ demands; promoting the new destination as “a place for people to find happiness and knowledge”; and overcoming an opening described as nothing less than mayhem.
An animated history of an iconic destination.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9080-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
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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