A colorful, persuasive re-evaluation of 1920s New York City, pinpointing it as the birthplace of modern American culture. Douglas (American Studies/Columbia Univ.) draws on familiar sources—memoirs by such Jazz Age novelists as Fitzgerald and Hemingway, the works of Harlem Renaissance writers, biographies of all these figures, virtually every academic text ever written about the period—but puts them together in exciting new ways to create a portrait of New York that includes black and white artists, men and women, elite and popular culture, architecture and aviation. She characterizes the 1920s' search for ``terrible honesty'' (Raymond Chandler's phrase) as a revolt against the sentimental, moralizing, matriarchal Victorian ethos she explored in The Feminization of American Culture (1977). Yet she links the unique ``adrenaline rush that was modernism'' to historical traits of American life that New York intellectuals rediscovered and claimed as their own: ``the flickering sense of place, purpose, and identity'' in the works of Twain, Melville, Hawthorne, and Poe, the pessimism that ``gained more in energy than it lost in hope.'' Her assessment of African-American music's impact on the 1920s and of black writers' complex relationship with the Jazz Age forcefully makes the point that American culture has always been a black-and- white affair—for people on both sides of the color line. Douglas sees 1920s New York as standing at a turning point, with the new mass media drawing their energy and structure from older forms of folk culture. She captures its essence in a lively narrative sprinkled with fabulous quotes: Zelda Fitzgerald remarking of the new tanning craze, ``I love those beautiful tan people. They seem so free of secrets''; singer Todd Duncan writing of his audition for George Gershwin, ``Imagine a Negro auditioning for a Jew, singing an old Italian aria.'' Analyzing this rich material with undogmatic passion, Douglas rescues multiculturalism from clichÇ and reclaims it as America's defining characteristic. Groundbreaking cultural history.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-374-11620-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1994
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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