The author is very much in the picture in this ambitious, self- and style-conscious portrait of 20th-century celebrities.
Part romance, part literary biography, part soapbox, this self-described “faction” depicts the “son of a Jewish cheese importer, besotted with the daughter of one of his country’s most famous writers”—in other words the youthful love affair between J.D. Salinger and Oona O’Neill.
“Maybe one day, someone will write a sentimental book about us!” writes Oona to Jerry in this metafiction from French writer Beigbeder (Windows on the World, 2005, etc.). And here it is, presented in modernist form complete with watercolor illustrations, appearances by the author, and claims to have invented the first YouTube novel (readers are urged to check out 17-year-old O’Neill’s 1942 screen test on that site). Opening with the assertion that the characters, places, events, and dates are all real, the book proceeds to embroider them with invented dialogue and correspondence, psychological, social, and literary speculation, and much more concerning the couple and their milieu. Their involvement begins in 1940 at the Stork Club, where shy embryonic writer Salinger sees Oona, a 15-year-old it girl hanging out with Gloria Vanderbilt. The sentimental centerpiece of their relationship is a rhapsodic summer night spent together on the Jersey shore: “They kissed, she floated, and he carried her.” But the mutuality fades. He loves her more; she is burdened by family issues and is also too young to have sex or marry. After Pearl Harbor, Salinger joins up, and O’Neill moves to California, where she will meet and marry Charlie Chaplin, age 54. Beigbeder’s romantic, analytical, sometimes excessively cute narration of events is mixed with walk-on roles for other famous figures—Capote, Hemingway, Orson Welles. The writing is cinematic and consumable but achieves power during descriptions of Salinger’s harrowing, life-changing World War II experiences.
The author is very much in the picture in this ambitious, self- and style-conscious portrait of 20th-century celebrities.Pub Date: Dec. 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61428-554-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Assouline
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2017
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
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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