Plodding and overdetailed at times, but overall a slice of Americana that captures much and offers welcome social history....
A multidecade study of a few Manhattan blocks that have been seen as emblematic of the entire city.
Five Points, so named after city authorities extended Anthony Street to join the X-shaped junction of Orange and Cross streets, lay in the heart of a mixed residential and commercial district that was always a bit rough-and-tumble, and as the city grew northward in the early 1800s, Five Points declined. In a Hogarthian painting of 1827, the artist George Catlin captured its already infamous reputation; and, as Anbinder (History/George Washington Univ.) writes, “Fights are breaking out everywhere; people are drunk; pigs roam the streets; whites and blacks are mixing; and prostitutes brazenly solicit customers.” Little changed over the next 70 years except the cast of characters: Five Points emerged as a touchdown point for successive waves of immigrants from Ireland and Italy, central and eastern Europe, as well as for blacks moving north after the Civil War. These newcomers, Anbinder writes, remained for a time “locked into the lowest-paying occupations, such as laborer, tailor, shoemaker, or seamstress” but eventually moved on to make room for the next group of newcomers. Prostitution and other vices, particularly alcoholism and drug addiction, remained constants; so did corruption, as policemen and city officials pocketed money and accepted favors to look the other way. So seedy did Five Points become that many of the horrific examples of slum life in pioneering reformer Jacob Riis’s reports came from its tenements. Eventually, after conditions reached their worst, even the hoodlums, hookers, drunks, and bohemians left, and the area—much of it razed to make room for Columbus Park—formed the beginning of New York’s Chinatown.
Plodding and overdetailed at times, but overall a slice of Americana that captures much and offers welcome social history. (40 b&w photographs)Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-85995-5
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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