Not rah-rah enough for the tourist trade, and too sketchy for the armchair traveler.
British biographer and novelist Wilson (The Victorians, 2003, etc.) briskly recaps London's evolution from Roman outpost to multicultural metropolis.
As part of Modern Library's Chronicles series, this does not aspire to the epic sweep or narrative amplitude of the city's recent “biography” (London, 2001) by Peter Ackroyd, to whom this volume is dedicated. Instead, Wilson provides a highly selective chronological account, focusing on the “barely controlled social and architectural chaos” that has always accompanied London's generally unplanned growth. He sketches in broad strokes: Roman London existed to serve the empire's needs; Norman London centralized government functions to facilitate the conquerors' hegemony; Tudor and Stuart London was insular and paranoid; Georgian London gave birth to the gracious architecture overshadowed by the ugly buildings of the Victorians, who redeemed themselves with such practical achievements as the underground railway and a decent sewer system; under Nazi bombardment, London and Londoners stood as emblems of steadfast resistance; Swinging London marked the city's transition from a workplace to playground for leisure-time amusements. The author's personal opinions, evident throughout, become particularly marked in the final chapters. “London Cosmopolis” cheerfully depicts an international city inhabited by Mexican classroom assistants, Ethiopian janitors, Sikh upholsterers, and Pakistani newspaper vendors, but “Silly London” scathingly anatomizes the “ill-disguised euphemisms and clichés” of Mayor Ken Livingston's 2002 master plan. The underlying truth, according to Wilson, is “that very few Londoners any longer make or do anything specifically useful and that your best chance of a job . . . is work as a waiter, a domestic servant in an hotel, or a prostitute.” It's punchy, all right, but despite tributes to London's “unquenchable life,” the author doesn't convey much affection for his place of residence, and his assertion that “in spite of all the mistakes made by its administrators, [London] will meet the challenges of the future” sounds decidedly halfhearted.
Not rah-rah enough for the tourist trade, and too sketchy for the armchair traveler.Pub Date: July 13, 2004
ISBN: 0-679-64266-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
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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