The author’s research is commendable, but it swamps readers with too many details.
How an 1897 boxing match helped make cinema history.
This is a long book about a very short film. Admittedly, that movie, a document of a heavyweight title bout called The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight, was once much longer—about three times longer than the 29-minute version eventually shown on June 10, 1997, at London’s National Film Theatre. But even the 90-minute version of the film, which no longer exists, would pale in comparison to Hawley’s (The Imjin War, 2014, etc.) densely written account, which weighs in at more than 350 pages. His subject is a little-known footnote to cinema history: the “fight film.” As motion pictures were being created—by everyone from Thomas Edison to Georges Méliès to the Lumières—two American brothers, Gray and Otway Latham, and their associate, Enoch Rector, realized there was money to be made by filming prizefights. Boxing was exceedingly popular at the end of the 19th century but prohibited in many states. Their idea was simple and savvy: given there were no laws (yet) against boxing films, they would find a pair of famous pugilists, put them in a ring, and rake in money by showing the footage all over the country. It was harder to pull off than they thought, though, and Hawley’s book painstakingly chronicles the enormous pre-bout preparation. The author splits his attention between the athletes and the cinematic pioneers to deliver an extremely well-researched tale of who did what, when, and how—and sometimes, even why. But this mountainous accumulation of detail is ultimately smothering. Readers don’t just learn about Eadweard Muybridge and his famous stop-motion films of Leland Stanford’s horses; they even learn the name of one of the equines (Sallie Gardner, if one wonders). In the same vein, Hawley doesn’t just describe a match between British fighter Robert Fitzsimmons (who would later appear in the titular film) and an Irish heavyweight named Peter Maher; he provides, literally, a blow-by-blow account. It’s not that his research is unwelcome; it’s simply overwhelming. By page 260, he’s only gotten to the first round of the big fight in Carson City, Nevada. So many writers give readers so little that it seems churlish to chide one who gives too much—but there’s a reason for the old adage “less is more.”
The author’s research is commendable, but it swamps readers with too many details.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 404
Publisher: Conquistador Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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