by Peter Hall ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 1, 1998
Any book this size must pass the hernia test: Is the payoff from reading it greater than the potential discomfort from lifting it? Urban planning expert Hall’s (University Coll., London) magnum opus passes, but just barely. He observes that certain cities, at certain times, pass through “golden ages,” and he seeks an explanation for these brief historical moments. Hall explores the cultural flowering of Athens, Florence, London, Vienna, Paris, and Berlin, each in their prime; considers the productive innovation of Manchester, Glasgow, Berlin, Detroit, Palo Alto, and Tokyo; and describes the merger of art and industry in Los Angeles and Memphis. This survey produces a wealth of information but doesn—t pin down specific variables explaining the rise and fall of great cities, so the indefatigable author seeks out the organizational basis of the urban order in Rome, London, Paris, New York, Los Angeles, and Stockholm. The empirical description is supported by theoretical analysis drawing upon a wide array of thinkers, and Hall’s ability to remain focused on his initial question through a thousand pages of material is remarkable. A reasonable reader, however, could feel cheated by his conclusion. While recognizing preconditions which can encourage or retard a city’s development, Hall finds that “time and chance happeneth to them all; it is a question of finding the moment and seizing the hour.” To explain that there’s no explanation cannot satisfy. And the failure may reflect an authorial flaw. For Hall, cities are too much the grandest variable in human existence for them to be epiphenomena, so factors such as the rise and fall of nations or shifts in global economic patterns remain at the margin of his analysis. Unfortunately, excluding the variables most likely to be fruitful is a recipe for intellectual frustration. Nevertheless, his exhaustive case studies of cities are commendable. (48 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-394-58732-4
Page Count: 1168
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1998
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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