A thoroughly researched academic study accessible to general readers.
Two sociology professors’ survey of New York con artists and how these reviled but crafty opportunists manage to make a living in the city’s informal economy.
New York City is full of haves and have-nots. But as Williams (New School for Social Research) and Milton (Queensborough Community Coll., CUNY) point out, this description is incomplete because it does not consider one invisible but ever present community: the con artists who take to have. In this book, the authors observe how people locked out of the “masterful” con game of the American dream create, and master, new games designed to temporarily beat the larger con. They base their account, which they call a “collage ethnography,” on direct interactions with nine New York con artists whom they interviewed and followed over the course of several years. What emerges from this collaboration is an intriguing study of the many different types of schemes—for example, dice and numbers games, slum-jewelry and designer knockoff cons, and tenant hustles—in which these men and women engage. Beyond describing how these cons work, Williams and Milton examine the con artist community and the enterprising individuals who inhabit it. They also argue that opportunism is an art that requires mastery of many complex rules. Indeed, con games are really a form of “street theater” that manages to “seduce” unsuspecting citizens into participating in an unfolding drama. What makes the book especially fascinating is the way the authors demonstrate how con games are not restricted by class—or any other social marker. Such behavior also takes place among “respectable” middle-class professionals such as law enforcement officials and, perhaps less surprisingly, wealthy New York business executives. Bold and illuminating, the book is a reminder that no matter how poor or rich people may be, greed—and therefore the capacity to cheat others for our own gain—“is embedded in our social DNA.”
A thoroughly researched academic study accessible to general readers.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-231-17082-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
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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