A multilayered, nuanced tour of “fishing societies throughout the world” and across millennia.
A study of global cultures that have been nurtured by the wealth from the sea.
In this gently scholarly, elegant examination of fishing peoples from the Neanderthals to modern times, Fagan (Emeritus, Archaeology/Univ. of California, Santa Barbara; The Attacking Ocean: The Past, Present, and Future of Rising Sea Levels, 2013, etc.) defies the Darwinian stereotypes of fishing cultures as simple or primitive. Global warming at the end of the last Ice Age, some 15,000 years ago, compounded the problems created by rising sea levels and led to the inundation of coasts, the creation of ponds and shallows, and flourishing fish populations. Fishers do not have the same cachet as hunters and farmers, but as the seas swelled, “subsistence fishing came into its own.” This necessitated the invention of new tools specifically for the endeavor, and many of these have changed surprisingly little over the centuries. Fagan proceeds chronologically, focusing in each chapter on different fishing cultures and the kinds of fish they caught, such as the canny clan of Pinnacle Point Cave, South Africa, who, more than 160,000 years ago, were attracted by the plentiful mollusks in local tide pools. While Neanderthals were big-game hunters, their diet also included a great deal of salmon. From 8000 to 2000 B.C.E., the area from the Danube to the Baltic Sea supported dense human settlements with a strong preference for marine foods—e.g., the Iron Gates peoples, who hunted the mighty sturgeon. In Scandinavia during this time, fermentation was implemented to preserve fish during cold winter months, while in the Nile delta, fish were used as the rations for the laborers to build the state. Fagan also discusses the Jomon of northern Japan, the Aleuts in Alaska and other societies in the Northwest, the Calusa Indians of Florida, and early cultures in both the Mediterranean and China, providing a compelling picture of how fishing was so integral in each society’s development.
A multilayered, nuanced tour of “fishing societies throughout the world” and across millennia.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-300-21534-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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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