Teeming with information, this is a must-read for fans of urban history.
A lively biography of New York’s second borough, “long lost in the thermonuclear glow of Manhattan” but eminently worthy of attention and affection.
One doesn’t often think of New York City as a place where geology matters, buried as it is under all that concrete and steel. Yet, as Campanella (Urban Studies and City Planning/Cornell Univ.; The Concrete Dragon: China's Urban Revolution and What it Means for the World, 2008, etc.) observes, it’s worth remembering that in Walt Whitman’s day, Brooklyn was a place of “ample hills.” Even today, the settlement patterns of the borough speak to the glacial past, with the creative class concentrated north of the ancient line of moraines and the till below the “dominion of immigrant strivers and working-class stiffs,” sans hip boutiques and coffee shops. There was a time when Coney Island was once an island, a time before Robert Moses carved into the western confines of Long Island a new geology of roadbeds and tall bridges. Campanella delights in overturning received wisdom as he moves from place to place: George Washington made a “strategic error” in trying to defend New York “against Britannia’s mighty clenched fist” when, after all, New York was a seaport and Britain the world’s chief naval power, and when Brooklyn was loyalist—all good reasons, he suggests, for the disastrous Battle of Brooklyn to be one of those things not often mentioned in polite company, to say nothing of textbooks. Those who try to navigate the traffic from Brooklyn to anywhere nearby won’t necessarily be cheered to know that people were complaining about “bridge crush” 120 years ago (“Brooklynites needed no trolleys to get to hell—they’d go a faster way”). Of particular interest are Campanella’s concluding remarks on the nature of the gentrification now affecting so much of Brooklyn, which involves a stifling lust for authenticity: “Gentification kills the real McCoy,” he writes, memorably, “to venerate its taxidermal remains.”
Teeming with information, this is a must-read for fans of urban history.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-691-16538-7
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 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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