An engaging, evocative work, despite its split personality.
Sparks (Dreaming of Wolves, 2010) recalls trekking through the Carpathian Mountains in this memoir and history of Eastern Europe.
An expedition called “The Way of the Wolf” offers a 2,000-mile journey through the Carpathians from Romania to Germany. During the trek, a group of wildlife professionals and eco-volunteers take an inventory of wolves and other animals that inhabit the range, track their movements, and collect scat samples for analysis. It’s the brainchild of Peter Sürth, the chief wolf tracker and technician at the Carpathian Large Carnivore Project, whom the author met while volunteering for the organization in Transylvania (as described in his previous book). Sparks’ latest offering takes a similar tack, recounting the day-to-day experiences of the expedition’s support team, describing the sweeping vistas of the surrounding landscape, and offering razor-sharp vignettes of Slavic village life. These observations often have the roughness of diary entries, and herein lies their candid charm. During an evening stroll, for example, the author overhears “the riffs of Take Me Home, Country Roads booming from a neighboring house”; he notes wryly, “John Denver’s voice occasionally managed to transcend multi-gendered, Romanian-accented shouts, hoots, hollers, and screams that accompanied the familiar and comforting melody. Take me home indeed.” However, the author’s attempts to combine a travelogue with a walking history of the territory are less successful. The research is detailed, accurate, and supported by a wealth of secondary sources, and it brings to life the rich history of the Carpathians and its people. Yet the diary sections become swamped by long, unwieldy historical digressions. As a result, there’s a sense that there are two books on offer here, each with its own merits—one, a charmingly disheveled travel narrative; the other, a straight-laced historical thesis— and the author struggles but ultimately fails to make a seamless connection between the two. Still, this book, punctuated by stunning color photography, will attract those with an interest in wildlife and Eastern Europe.
An engaging, evocative work, despite its split personality.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Koehler Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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