Humans are makers, the author argues persuasively in this illuminating book, in need of renewed connection to the...
Tracing human existence from prehistory on, a historian celebrates resourcefulness and skill.
British archaeologist and medievalist Langlands (Medieval History/Swansea Univ.), presenter of the BBC series Victorian Farm and Edwardian Farm, makes his literary debut with a delightful, informative melding of memoir and history. Like Ruth Goodman did in her books How to be a Victorian (2014) and How to be a Tudor (2016), Langlands conveys the reality of daily life in earlier times, focusing especially on “physical adeptness, strength and fitness” along with hard-won wisdom about materials and techniques, all components of cræft. He believes that society today is “going backwards,” relying on machines that have rendered us “lazy, stupid, desensitised and disengaged.” On his journey of discovery, Langlands finds evidence of craftiness in museums, such as the Museum of Welsh Life, where he investigated beekeeping; and an Icelandic farmstead museum containing implements and artifacts of daily life: a cornucopia of tools and gear, along with “skilfully made baskets, chests and trunks” to hold them. Much of what he learned came from his own determined efforts. “As is often the case with my experimental historical crafts addiction,” he admits as he faced the challenge of making a thatched roof, “one extremely long and arduous task leads to another extremely long and arduous task.” The author discloses the complex processes involved in creating items we take for granted: woolen fabric, for example, requires an understanding of “how fleeces translate into fibres, how fibres translate into yarns, how both respond to dyes,” and how yarn becomes fabric for particular uses. The tanning of hides into leather is similarly complicated, with multiple steps of cleaning, preserving, and drying. Farming, haying, weaving, basketry, and boat-making are some of the crafts Langlands describes in fascinating detail as he travels through time and place. He regrets that workmanship is no longer revered: “we have become detached from making,” he writes, “and it isn’t a good state for us to be in.”
Humans are makers, the author argues persuasively in this illuminating book, in need of renewed connection to the intelligence and ingenuity of craft.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-393-63590-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
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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