Richly detailed and thoroughly entertaining.
Homage to gifted disruptors.
New Yorker staff writer Denby celebrates the “cultural achievement of postwar American Jews” by profiling four prominent figures: Mel Brooks (b. 1926), Betty Friedan (1921-2006), Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990), and Norman Mailer (1923-2007). “Unruly Jews,” as he calls them, they had in common “a bounding unapologetic egotism marked, at the same time, by a generous temperament and a stern sense of obligation.” They had in common, as well, being the subjects of cartoonist David Levine, whose unmistakable caricatures illustrate the book. Denby feels a connection to his subjects both because of his own Jewish background and because of what they represent—a “powerful shadow existence…the full development of lives I have not lived, cannot live.” Drawing on memoirs, biographies, interviews, archival sources, and histories, Denby creates vivid portraits of his feisty quartet. He captures Brooks’ raunchy humor, Friedan’s uncompromising intensity, Mailer’s wildness, and Bernstein’s prodigious cultural, intellectual, and sensual appetites. At a time when antisemitism was waning, they didn’t try to hide their identity as Jews, but to redefine it. Mailer, for one, escaped the image of the “‘nice Jewish boy’ by inventing the bad Jewish boy.” Friedan folded in the “ethical passions” she inherited from Jewish traditions with “the traditions of left-wing protest in the thirties (anti-fascist and pro-labor), much of it created by Jews.” Each was zealous, ambitious, and bold. “In different ways,” Denby writes, “they liberated the Jewish body, releasing the unconscious of the Jewish middle class, ending the constrictions and avoidances that the immigrants and their children, so eager to succeed in America, imposed on themselves.” Although they were hardly alone among a generation of laudable Jewish intellectuals and entertainers, Denby makes a persuasive case for their singular eminence.
Richly detailed and thoroughly entertaining.Pub Date: April 8, 2025
ISBN: 9781250193407
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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 Yorkerstaff 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
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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