A dynamic, informed, absorbing exploration of literal and figurative power struggles.
How a proposed wind farm set off epic struggles on one of America’s new frontiers.
This account of a modern land battle in the American West, told dramatically in the form of narrative nonfiction, explores “a story centuries in the making, with millionaires and billionaires, cattle barons and Crow warriors, prospectors and politicians, meat-packers and medicine men.” A coveted region of Montana stands at the center of the complex disputes described here, with competing factions pursuing sometimes incompatible aims: developing wind power, securing ancestral tribal rights, or reserving the picturesque landscape for private and commercial interests. The various scenes that play out suggest a reiteration of the nation’s frontier history, with lax regulation of aggressive instincts and enormous disparities in power. The author’s brisk, consistently engaging storytelling vividly sets forth the financial stakes involved for those who control the land and its energy potential and the cultural and personal stakes for those who seek to prolong traditional ways of life. We gain a memorable sense, at last, of what this territory has meant to its Indigenous inhabitants as well as waves of settlers in the Montana region. A major difference from the 19th century, as the book makes clear, is that this 21st-century Wild West faces an existential crisis as the climate warms and ecosystems threaten collapse. Old ideals about the inexhaustibility of the nation’s resources must yield to new understandings of sustainability. An enormous expansion of wind farms in places such as this, Gamerman notes, will be essential for a successful transition to a clean energy future and the mitigation of harms produced by exploitative practices. This Western narrative is, she convincingly concludes, crucially relevant to the entire nation’s fate.
A dynamic, informed, absorbing exploration of literal and figurative power struggles.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781982158163
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
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 Yorker staff 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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