A welcome addition to the literature of America’s grasslands, which need all the champions they can get.
A sweeping history of the American prairie, “a region we have exploited almost to death.”
Not many people take their vacations on the American plains, an area definitively dismissed as “the flyover zone.” Yet, as Minneapolis journalists Hage and Marcotty write, “the North American prairie is nonetheless one of the richest ecosystems on Earth,” along with its “siblings” in Central Asia, South America, and southern Africa. For all that importance—just one of the three main divisions of the prairie harbors 1,600 species of grass and flowers—much of the prairie is gone; a scant 1%, the authors write, exists in the eastern tallgrass prairie that once extended from Illinois to eastern Kansas. Whereas past civilizations collapsed after unknowingly exhausting their farmlands, the authors write meaningfully, we do so fully aware of that damage. This is all the more so in an era of rapid climate change, for the hidden underground world of the prairie and the root systems of its vegetation serve as “one of the world’s last great buffers” against it, with grasses sequestering carbon dioxide deep beneath the surface. Row crops such as corn and soybeans, conversely, store that carbon dioxide far closer to the surface, releasing it in plowing—and in any event, growing those crops requires vast quantities of fossil fuels, some in the form of synthetic fertilizers that poison watercourses and have destroyed much of the sea life in the Gulf of Mexico. To battle the negative effects of pollution, climate change, and industrial agriculture, Hage and Marcotty argue for restoring large sections of grassland to their original state and, even more politically sensitive, eliminating the federal subsidy for corn ethanol. They also propose a different crop regime that would increase ground cover, preserve the soil, and—importantly—allow farmers to make a profit at the same time.
A welcome addition to the literature of America’s grasslands, which need all the champions they can get.Pub Date: May 27, 2025
ISBN: 9780593447406
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: today
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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