by Bathsheba Demuth ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 20, 2019
A superb book, essential reading for students of the once-and-future Arctic.
A lyrical, deeply learned ecological history of the region where Asia and North America meet.
The peoples of Beringia are many, writes Demuth (Environmental History/Brown Univ.), but ultimately, they divide into Natives—the Iñupiaq, Chukchi, Yupik, and so on—and foreigners, who number everyone else. Those foreigners—Russians, British explorers, and Yankee whalers—fundamentally altered the environment of the region in a fairly short time. If, as the author notes, Natives and foreigners alike went in search of whales as a source of sustenance, they did so with different ideas of what to do with their prize. Apparently influenced by students of Howard Odum, Demuth writes of energy flows across the region. “To be alive,” she writes, “is to take a place in a chain of conversions.” The seas surrounding the Bering Straits are among the most productive ecosystems on the planet, and “human life in Beringia was shaped, in part, by the ways energy moved over the land and through the sea.” Many of those ways were purely extractive, as energy sources, from ambergris to oil, were located and taken away, a process against which Native people and some foreigners militated. One of Demuth’s great contributions is her exploration of the radical history of labor in the remote regions, a history soon supplanted by corporate capitalism on one shore and the gulag on the other, even as new arrivals concentrated their efforts on “liberating energy.” Now, she writes, a new chapter in Beringian history is being composed with climate change, a transformation that led one elder to observe that “foreigners had brought the end of a world to his people a century ago." The far north has inspired a remarkable body of literature, highlighted, in recent years, by Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams and Lawrence Millman’s At the End of the World. Demuth’s book, based on years of field research and comprehensive study, easily takes its place alongside them.
A superb book, essential reading for students of the once-and-future Arctic.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-393-63516-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2019
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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