A remarkably thoughtful and elegant history of Boston’s place in tattoo lore.
A history of tattooing in Boston emphasizes the role of the Liberty family.
Since the 1970s, Lyle Tuttle (“tattooer to the stars”) has been accumulating art, artifacts, and ephemera of American tattoo history. A centerpiece of his collection and the focus of this well-crafted book by Bray and Hodges is the story of Boston’s Liberty family. Showcasing Tuttle’s collection, in addition to oral histories and secondary source research, the first half of this work uses the Liberty family as a lens to explore the wider history of tattooing in Boston during the 20th century. The volume begins in the “carnivalesque neighborhood” of Scollay Square and Edward “Dad” Liberty’s forging of a “tattooing dynasty” through “blunt enterprise” and a willingness “to skirt the edges of middle-class social norms.” Woven into the history of the Liberty family is a broader account of the evolution of tattooing, from the “Freaks and Curiosities” niche of the early decades of the 20th century to its broadening appeal among “soldiers, sailors, civilian patriots, and draftees” during World War II. The book’s latter half turns out to be as well-researched and captivating as the narrative overview of the Liberty family tree. The second section features the family’s catalog of original art and other “designs painted on sheets, boards, books, window shades, and scraps of repurposed paper.” In over 70 pages, readers are treated to the sheer diversity of the catalog that spans from topless women and crucifixes to highly detailed East Asian–inspired watercolors and brash “Folk-meets-Americana-and-Seamanship” imagery popularized during World War II. This catalog is complemented with historical photographs, signs, advertisements, memorabilia, and newspaper clippings that make for not only an engaging read, but also a gorgeous, unique book best suited for coffee-table displays. Despite the volume’s many strengths, some readers may long for additional editorial commentary in the catalog beyond the basic descriptions provided. Moreover, an extension of the history of tattoos into the 21st century, when ink has become extremely ubiquitous across sociocultural lines, would have created a more complete timeline.
A remarkably thoughtful and elegant history of Boston’s place in tattoo lore. (index)Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-578-75840-4
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Rake House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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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