A superb contribution to the history of American literature and the Lost Generation.
Agile life of a nearly forgotten writer and editor.
It’s meta to say here, but as Howard, a writer and editor, notes, there was a time in this country when literary criticism and book reviewing were taken seriously and exercised enormous influence over the culture. “Critics enjoyed prestige and sway over not just educated, but even mass opinion,” acting as guides and gatekeepers to the flood of cultural production following World War II. Enter Malcolm Cowley, a farm-born Pennsylvanian and later resident of New York and Paris, one of the post–World War I expatriate Americans. Cowley, according to Howard’s fluent, fast-moving narrative, wrote mountains of reviews and many books, and he knew everyone and championed the writers whom he admired, not least of them Ernest Hemingway, who was also living in Paris and was all but unknown, and William Faulkner, who had been all but forgotten; Cowley’s advocacy, Howard suggests, was directly instrumental in Faulkner being awarded the Nobel Prize. Cowley was adept at the politics of culture and publishing: “His career is a master class in how the literary Game of Thrones was played in the twentieth century, and, to a certain extent, to this day.” But he was also deeply generous and of unfailing good taste, discovering and publishing Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, among many other books and writers. Howard does a fine job of placing Cowley in the cultural context of his long career—he lived to be 90 and wrote almost to the end—which includes nearly being blacklisted during the McCarthy era, having been a leftist in his early years and a liberal after. John Updike’s encomium on Cowley’s death says much: “He was an energetic and gregarious man who lived the life of the mind with gusto and good nature.”
A superb contribution to the history of American literature and the Lost Generation.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780525522058
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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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