A thoroughly researched history of a lurid publisher and Americans’ lust for scandal.
In the 1950s, a sleazy gossip magazine that exposed movie stars’ private lives became a bestseller.
Historian and law professor Barbas (Univ. of Buffalo School of Law; Newsworthy: The Supreme Court Battle Over Privacy and Press Freedom, 2017, etc.) traces the creation, heyday, and demise of Confidential, a celebrity scandal magazine published by Robert Harrison (1904-1978), whose career in journalism took off in the 1940s with a spate of girlie magazines that featured scantily clad and naked “babes” along with a dollop of sadomasochism and fetishism. Always on the lookout for more readers, in 1953, Harrison focused on America’s 50 million moviegoers, who thronged to theaters each week and bought the many fan magazines that had proliferated since the 1920s. Harrison was not content with promoting the whitewashed images of stars put forth by studios. Instead, he gathered gossip from sources including hotel and restaurant workers, celebrities’ friends and enemies, hairdressers and bartenders, prostitutes and lovers, film crews, close and distant relatives, and “disgruntled maids and butlers.” Vetted by a team of lawyers, the stories in Confidential were written carefully to avoid libel suits—until some stars rose up indignantly and finally brought the magazine down. Harrison, as Barbas portrays him, was cynical, homophobic, and racist, attitudes reflected in his publications; one of his editors derided him as “rude, crude, and unlettered.” He was also “shrewd, meticulous, and demanding,” a workaholic and micromanager, with a sure eye for what the public wanted; in the 1950s, American readers wanted sleaze. “Confidential,” writes the author, “played to the fantasies, curiosities, and fears of a nation that was deeply conflicted about sex” and “offered an enticing vision of what a less-repressed world might look like.” Despite a veneer of cultural analysis, Barbas plays into the same desire for sleaze that fuels contemporary exposé publications by reprising in detail the magazine’s lewd revelations that shattered marriages, ruined careers, and shamed many individuals.
A thoroughly researched history of a lurid publisher and Americans’ lust for scandal.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-912777-54-2
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 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 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.
