Despite few groundbreaking insights, this is entertaining, vivid cultural history.
A swinging, blood-drenched history about the symbiotic relationship between jazz and organized crime through much of the 20th century.
In this steamy, noirish account of the Jazz Age and beyond, similar in spirit to English’s Havana Nocturne and other books, the author takes readers from the bordellos of New Orleans and the speak-easies of Chicago to the tropical clubs of Havana and the desert empire of Vegas. The music provides the soundtrack to a wide range of illicit activity, which generated revenues that allowed the mob to flourish and to launder money from less legitimate endeavors. Within the strictures of so-called respectable society, both the Black musicians who developed jazz and the immigrants who built an empire on vice were outsiders. The musicians often felt that they had a better shot at success and protection by aligning their professional lives with the underworld rather than with the police and authorities of the straight world. Yet as nightclubs with names such as the Cotton Club and the Plantation indicate, there was plenty of racism, as well. Black musicians were often restricted to the stage, and the audience and management of the clubs were almost entirely White. English splits the narrative into two halves: In the first, the author focuses on Louis Armstrong; in the second, Frank Sinatra, both of whom had connections with organized crime throughout their careers. By the end of the century, both jazz and organized crime had changed, with the former declining in popularity and the latter in power. The civil rights and Black Power movements, as well as the progression of the music from the dance floor to the conservatory, contributed to the severing of a relationship that had allowed both to flourish through the eras of red-light districts, Prohibition, and corrupt city bosses. Much of this story has been told elsewhere, but English capably brings it back to life.
Despite few groundbreaking insights, this is entertaining, vivid cultural history.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-303141-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
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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