Skywalks
University of Nebraska Press (Verlag)
978-1-4962-3313-4 (ISBN)
In 1981 the suspended walkways—or “skywalks”—in Kansas City’s Hyatt Regency hotel fell and killed 114 people. It was the deadliest building collapse in the United States until the fall of New York’s Twin Towers on 9/11. In Skywalks R. Eli Paul follows the actions of attorney Robert Gordon, an insider to the bitter litigation that followed. Representing the plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit against those who designed, built, inspected, owned, and managed the hotel, Gordon was tenacious in uncovering damaging facts. He wanted his findings presented before a jury, where his legal team would assign blame from underlings to corporate higher-ups, while securing a massive judgment in his clients’ favor.
But when the case was settled out from under Gordon, he turned to another medium to get the truth out: a quixotic book project that consumed the rest of his life. For a decade the irascible attorney-turned-writer churned through a succession of high-powered literary agents, talented ghost writers, and New York trade publishers. Gordon’s resistance to collaboration and compromise resulted in a controversial but unpublishable manuscript, “House of Cards,” finished long after the public’s interest had waned. His conclusions, still explosive but never receiving their proper attention, laid the blame for the disaster largely at the feet of the hotel’s owner and Kansas City’s most visible and powerful corporation, Hallmark Cards Inc.
Gordon gave up his lucrative law practice and lived the rest of his life as a virtual recluse in his mansion in Mission Hills, Kansas. David had fought Goliath, and to his despair, Goliath had won. Gordon died in 2008 without ever seeing his book published or the full truth told. Skywalks is a long-overdue corrective, built on a foundation of untapped historical materials Gordon compiled, as well as his own unpublished writings.
R. Eli Paul is the former director of the Missouri Valley Special Collections at the Kansas City Public Library. His public history career has spanned four decades, including previous tenures at the Nebraska State Historical Society, Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh, and the National World War I Museum. Paul is the author or editor of several books, including Eyewitness at Wounded Knee (Nebraska, 2016), Autobiography of Red Cloud: War Leader of the Oglalas, and Blue Water Creek and the First Sioux War, 1854–1856.
List of Illustrations
Dramatis Personae
Prologue
1. The Tapes
2. Molly Riley, a Class Act
3. Robert Charles “Bobby” Gordon
4. One in a Hundred Lawsuits
5. Hallmark’s Kansas City
6. The Deponent
7. The Federal Skywalk Cases
8. Setback
9. Betrayal
10. Writer
11. House of Cards
12. The Gordon Thesis
13. Rinse and Repeat
14. What Might Have Been
15. Excerpt
16. Interruptions
17. Finales
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Appendix: Selections from the Deposition of Donald Joyce Hall
Notes
Bibliographic Essay
Index
| Erscheinungsdatum | 23.01.2023 |
|---|---|
| Zusatzinfo | 23 photographs, 1 illustration, 1 appendix, index |
| Verlagsort | Lincoln |
| Sprache | englisch |
| Maße | 152 x 229 mm |
| Themenwelt | Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Geschichte / Politik ► Regional- / Landesgeschichte |
| Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte | |
| Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie | |
| ISBN-10 | 1-4962-3313-1 / 1496233131 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1-4962-3313-4 / 9781496233134 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
| Haben Sie eine Frage zum Produkt? |
aus dem Bereich
