Effectively captures the rhythm and the zeitgeist of a special time and place not so long ago.
ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award–winning music critic Orgill celebrates the Depression’s big-band soundtrack.
Bracketing her narrative with the Joe Louis-Max Schmeling match in the summer of 1936 and the Brown Bomber’s triumph over the Nazi boxer in their memorable rematch just two years later, Orgill chronicles the rise of the great swing orchestras. Playing against Count Basie was Chick Webb. Dueling bands found the groove and delighted the paying customers. Featured were female singers Billie Holiday, sporting a gardenia in her hair, and Ella Fitzgerald, in a decorous long gown. Jamming with the cool cats were the likes of Buck Clayton, Lester Young and Gene Krupa. Benny Goodman broke the color line by hiring black musicians. Nonmusical backup was provided by Adam Clayton Powell Sr. and Jr., Jacob Lawrence and Langston Hughes—all handsome dudes with good-looking, pencil-thin mustaches. Eleanor was traipsing around, writing about her day, and Franklin was broadcasting his fireside chats. Amelia Earhart flew off to who knows where. On the air: The Lone Ranger, The Shadow, Fibber McGee and Jack Benny. The tone of this history is decidedly sepia, the main action definitely uptown: showtime at the Apollo and stompin’ at the Savoy. With just a bit of vamping to maintain the beat, Orgill’s prose, reminiscent of Down Beat or Metronome, swings with period vernacular. Not content to help readers remember, her evocation of those past days bids us to listen.
Effectively captures the rhythm and the zeitgeist of a special time and place not so long ago.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-089750-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Smithsonian/Collins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2008
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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