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
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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