A fluent addition to the literature of America’s rivers.
A lively survey of Old Man River, born of extensive research and travel.
The Mississippi River, writes New Orleans–based journalist Upholt, is contested on many fronts. One is why the river bears the name of a continent-wide system when the Missouri is almost twice as long and the Ohio contributes more water. Another is whether to allow the river anything of its wild self. “The only longer human-made landform on the planet is China’s Great Wall,” writes the author about the river-taming levee that runs to “the headwaters of the Atchafalaya.” Levees keep the floodplain from doing its work, and Upholt shows how before the engineers got to it, the floodplain would be frequently submerged as the river flowed and overflowed, yielding the richest of soil. Many other things have changed, including invasive species displacing river natives such as the buffalo fish. Upholt builds a natural and human history along the template established by the Rivers of America series of yore, a blend of anecdote and observation. His account is more politically charged than all that, though, with an environmental twist that soon turns to economics. In the economy of enslavement, for instance, riverine malaria felled captive workers, and only the richest of plantation owners, “able to afford the workforce needed to make this landscape work,” could cultivate the river’s fertile bottomlands. Naturally, it’s just that class of wealthy owner that the levee system protects. Pulling back those levees, Upholt writes, could refresh the bottomlands while also enriching the river. In one example, where the river widens along its plain, “Corps of Engineers fish surveys found a record-breaking number of juvenile sturgeon.” It would cost billions to do so, but for any Mississippi River aficionado—and clearly, Upholt is one—it would be worth every cent.
A fluent addition to the literature of America’s rivers.Pub Date: June 11, 2024
ISBN: 9780393867879
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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
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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