An admirable effort to illuminate a hidden world that will be most useful to fellow researchers in the social sciences.
Sociological research shines a light on a nightlife culture in which sex and drugs flourish openly.
Williams (Sociology/New School for Social Research; Teenage Suicide Notes: An Ethnography of Self-Harm, 2017, etc.) bridges the ivory tower and the urban subculture, employing ethnographic research to illuminate a world rarely glimpsed outside pulp fiction and film noir. The after-hours club of the title flourished in 1980s and ’90s Harlem, before rampant gentrification had transformed the neighborhood and cultural attitudes. “I live in two worlds, the world of the academy by day and the life of the street by night,” writes the author, “and I felt I had to reconcile them if I was ever to be the writer—the sociologist—I wanted to be.” In this book, he also has to reconcile then and now, because most of his field work was conducted two or three decades ago, before the internet, smartphones, and changing laws and attitudes had transformed the world. His research took place largely in loud and dark clubs, with subjects drunk or high on cocaine, making it tough to tell what they were saying or whom he could trust. He couldn’t tape or take detailed notes at the time, so much of what he details had to be reconstructed from memory. What he unveils is a subculture with its own codes and language, with moral values at odds with society at large, where drug use isn’t a sickness, addiction, or character defect but rather an “example of present-day resistance to conservative values and the desire of human beings to seek pleasurable ways of being regardless of risk.” Williams explores the cultural currency of cocaine, the commodification of sex by women who do not feel that they are being exploited, and the attitude of cool that pervades the after-hours atmosphere. He admits to voyeurism and some conflicted attitudes about the behavior he reports.
An admirable effort to illuminate a hidden world that will be most useful to fellow researchers in the social sciences.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-231-17789-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
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
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