Anderson’s back-and-forth style is challenging, and he has an unfortunate penchant for gratuitous profanity. Nevertheless,...
An irreverent look at one of the nation’s quirkier cities, “one of the great weirdo cities of the world.”
“In the larger economy of American attention,” writes Anderson, “Oklahoma City’s main job has always been to be ignored.” The author, a winner of a National Magazine Award, seeks to rectify this popular neglect via a rollicking history of the nation’s 27th-largest city. Founded in one day in 1889, Oklahoma City has garnered a reputation for violence (its first mayor died of a gunshot wound), chaotic weather (the first photograph of a tornado was taken there), and grandiose, outsized ambition (its Will Rogers World Airport has no international flights). Anderson helpfully profiles several of the residents and leaders who have given the city its unique character, including civil rights activist Clara Luper, legendary weatherman Gary England, and Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne. But the book centers on the Oklahoma City Thunder, the NBA team formerly known as the Seattle Supersonics. Led by the supremely talented duo of Russell Westbrook (an enigmatic, hellbent-for-leather point guard) and Kevin Durant (a quietly efficient scoring machine), the Thunder reached the Finals in 2012 only to regress in subsequent years, culminating in a heartbreaking defeat in the 2016 playoffs at the hands of the Golden State Warriors, with whom Durant subsequently signed as a free agent. Anderson toggles between recent Thunder seasons and the history of Oklahoma City, portraying the team’s highs and lows as symbols of the town’s boom-and-bust story. Unquestionably, the residents have forged a deep bond with the Thunder. In one of the book’s more touching moments, Anderson interviews an Oklahoma Supreme Court justice who notes how the arrival of the franchise in 2008 helped to heal the figurative wounds inflicted by the terrorist bombing 13 years earlier.
Anderson’s back-and-forth style is challenging, and he has an unfortunate penchant for gratuitous profanity. Nevertheless, he provides an entertaining history of a city that, for all its booms and busts, is never boring.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8041-3731-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 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 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 2024 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.
