Despite their always sensational (and sometimes florid) style, the authors manage to land some jarring punches in some very...
Husband-and-wife investigative reporters view Las Vegas as our shadow capital, a sordid symbol of the greed, corruption, and falseness that permeate the country.
Like confident boxers, Denton and Morris begin from the opening bell to eschew the jab in favor of the haymaker. “Drug money founded modern Las Vegas,” they announce, and throughout this tough, troubling volume they are rarely so timid. After an alarming prologue, they deliver dark portraits of players from Vegas’ founding years—Meyer Lansky, Benny Binion, Pat McCarran, “Bugsy” Siegel, Hank Greenspun—and then conclude this rogues’ gallery with an assessment of Estes Kefauver, whose congressional hearings on organized crime fizzled in the 1950s. “He was,” they declare, “tragically shallow, even naïve, about what he would be confronting, and what it would cost.” Denton and Morris then proceed chronologically to outline the history of the city and its criminal creators. Among their most useful observations is that the popular term “Mafia” (and its Italian “family” connotations) obscures the far more insidious combinations of people involved in the gambling, skimming, and drug trafficking that are the foundation of Las Vegas. They believe these illegal activities exist because of a vast but loose criminal conspiracy among casino owners, politicians, law enforcement personnel, journalists, labor leaders, religious leaders (they explore, for example, the heavy Mormon investment in Vegas), and government agencies. They tar virtually every US president since Truman with the black brush of Vegas (including an amusing account of a young Ronald Reagan’s disastrous attempt in 1953 to become a Vegas entertainer), and their prodigious research leads them to see Vegas’ tentacles extending everywhere—even to Bob Dole and Bill Clinton, both of whom accepted contributions from casino king Steve Wynn. Sometimes the guilt-by-association arguments collide with a sense of fairness, and the authors seem never to have met a conspiracy theory they do not embrace.
Despite their always sensational (and sometimes florid) style, the authors manage to land some jarring punches in some very sensitive places. (16 pages b&w photos)Pub Date: April 10, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-40130-X
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
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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