Fascinating insights into San Francisco history and the transformation of other waterfront cities.
The compelling 125-year history and continuing resonance of an architectural landmark.
Urban design critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, King is uniquely well placed to tell the story of San Francisco’s Ferry Building, one of the most recognizable buildings in America. “Every city has a landmark like this,” writes the author, “a building through which one can read the past.” His explanation of the engineering marvel of its construction on an artificial seawall and appraisals of its aesthetic merits and symbolic importance as a "monumental gateway" to the city are easily accessible to general readers. King makes a strong case that the Ferry Building is "a profound work of civic infrastructure connecting the city to the region and the nation, proof of urban ascendance." Architect Arthur Page Brown's masterpiece, which opened in 1898, withstood San Francisco's disastrous 1906 earthquake and then survived its usurpation as a transportation hub by the rise of the automobile and construction of the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges in the late 1930s. The building then spent 50 years in limbo, worsened by the 1959 construction of the elevated Embarcadero Freeway, which blocked its classical façade and closed off downtown's connection to the waterfront. The Ferry Building held firm during the 1989 earthquake, while the Freeway was compromised. This led to the roadway's 1991 demolition, spurring what Mayor Art Agnos called "renewal for a spectacular waterfront that has been blighted for 32 years by a concrete monster." King describes the building's rebirth as a marketplace and what Bon Appetit dubbed "a kind of cathedral for the city’s food-worshipping population.” The book’s climax and most salient point is King’s compelling exploration of the existential predicament facing the Ferry Building, adjacent piers, and waterfront—and those of all port cities—as climate change leads to inexorable sea-level rise.
Fascinating insights into San Francisco history and the transformation of other waterfront cities.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781324020325
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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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