A strong contribution to the history of not just the fire, but urban America generally.
A complex, capably narrated history of the 1871 fire that remade Chicago.
As architecture scholar Berg, author of Grand Avenues and 38 Nooses, observes, the fire of Oct. 8, 1871, did not occur in isolation. The weather had been unusually hot and dry, and “between October 2 and October 7, the city’s 193 firemen had been summoned to twenty-eight fires” whose causes were various, from carelessly discarded cigarettes to grease spills and oil-soaked rags that spontaneously burst into flames, and the fires burned mostly in places newly crowded in the immigration boom. A cow was almost certainly not the cause of the infamous blaze, though the fire that sprang forth that night sparked somewhere in the neighborhood of Irish immigrant Kate Leary’s home. As Berg notes, “almost all the houses in the West Division were made of pine-wood…a cheap and speedy way to build” but one that created tinderboxes. The fire had numerous knock-on effects, as the author shows. Some concerned Leary herself, smeared in a calumniating press; one cause of the blame, it seems, was that her home was spared while so many were not, but another was the fact that she was an Irish immigrant in a time of growing anti-immigrant sentiment and Know-Nothing political activism. One of its chief exponents was Joseph Medill, a newspaper magnate who was devoted to Republican politics and anti-Catholic vituperation. Other players in the drama that Berg lays out, in which powerful economic forces contested to rebuild Chicago in their own image, include merchant Marshall Field and Wilbur Storey, another newspaper publisher whose “reporters were instructed never, ever to let the absence of facts get in their way.” In the end, their remaking of Chicago helped shape the form of the modern city—architecturally stunning but also sharply segregated by class and race.
A strong contribution to the history of not just the fire, but urban America generally.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2023
ISBN: 9780804197847
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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