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 Yorkerstaff 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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
