An elegant resource for all who dwell in, or care about, cities. The glossy and—no doubt expensive—illustrations are a real...
A powerful new urban history with implications for today.
British journalist and historian Hunt takes readers to 19th-century England, when “the city was at the heart of public debate.” Thinkers, laborers, moralists, politicians and ordinary middle-class folk lived in, and argued about, urban space. What were the mores of the new industrial city? The Brits were optimistic and, at least through the reign of Victoria, took great civic pride in their cities (the pronoun their is intentional—crucial to Hunt’s argument is the idea that city-dwellers felt a sense of ownership about the cities they lived and worked in). The first third of the text here offers a rich history of ideas as Hunt explores how the likes of Engels and Carlyle understood the city. The middle section focuses on the cultural life of the Victorian city. City-dwellers saw Florence as the model city and did their best to see that Manchester and Birmingham would be seats of hard work and liberty, not to mention art. Determined to show that cities were about more than just crass money-grubbing, the English developed a “proudly urban. . . culture with its endogenous heroes and traditions.” Urbanites created an innovative city infrastructure, with architecture to match. But, eventually, many of them left, and Hunt’s final chapters trace the middle class’s move to the suburbs (an added bonus here are the amusing quotations from The Diary of a Nobody, George and Weedon Grossmiths’ 1892 satire of suburban anomie). This is a story of decline, and for Hunt, it is “tragic” that the “suburbs were increasingly imagined as the natural home of the English people.” One need not scratch too deep to see a critique of our own 21st-century, though Hunt’s specific suggestions for urban reform are limited to the obvious, such as improving city schools.
An elegant resource for all who dwell in, or care about, cities. The glossy and—no doubt expensive—illustrations are a real plus.Pub Date: May 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-297-60767-7
Page Count: 472
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
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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