Nothing new, but for those who can’t get enough, a nice addition to the groaning shelf of books about the Hamptons’ artsy...
Agreeable series of sketches about notable residents of Long Island’s East End, by the art critic for the East Hampton Star.
A short introductory chapter traces the East End’s history from the time the first settlers arrived in the mid-17th century through prosperity fueled by the whaling industry to the arrival of the first artists in the 1870s. Then this straightforward chronicle gives way to impressionistic snapshots of the area (which began to be known as the Hamptons in the 1960s) at various significant moments, usually seen through the eyes of a famous artist or writer. William Merritt Chase paints figures against the Shinnecock Bay landscape in 1902. Jackson Pollock’s ghost, wandering through the Metropolitan’s 20th-century art wing, recalls his years with wife Lee Krasner at a cottage in Springs during the 1940s. Poet Frank O’Hara leaves his day job at MoMA in 1966 to board the Montauk Line’s 4:19 train; his friend Fairfield Porter, meanwhile, has an affair with unstable Jimmy Schuyler while wife Anne seethes in their Southampton house, “the New York school’s summer camp from the late 1950s through the 1960s.” Jean Stafford drinks away her final years after A.J. Liebling’s death, in the book’s saddest chapter. And, of course, de Kooning rides his bicycle from his home to the studio where he paints in between drinks. The familiar material is (mostly) redeemed by Long’s fine prose, particularly the lovely descriptions of the Long Island landscape and light. Alcoholism, adultery and professional jealousy among creative people seem to hold a perennial fascination, and Long’s pleasant text is warmed by a longtime resident’s intimate knowledge of the East End’s landmarks: the Green River Cemetery where Pollock’s body lies under an enormous boulder; the Springs General Store run by Dan Miller; the Holiday Grill that marks “the real gateway to the Hamptons.”
Nothing new, but for those who can’t get enough, a nice addition to the groaning shelf of books about the Hamptons’ artsy crowd.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-16538-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
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
© 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.
