A historical work with some striking images of distinctive Delaware buildings and a dry text.
An illustrated book offers a photographic journey through three centuries of Delaware history.
Between 1638, when Swedish explorers landed on its shores, and the opening of the New Castle & French Town Railroad in 1832, Delaware was something of a Colonial backwater, its few settlements largely clustered along Delaware Bay. As a result, Tabler writes, modern development took some time to reach the Delmarva Peninsula, and “Delaware’s stock of colonial structures has for the most part remained undisturbed far longer than many other colonial era states. Its key historical sites are more readily accessible today.” Those historical sites form the basis for the author’s journey through Delaware’s pre-railroad history, which benefits from his pleasing photographs. Each of the book’s pages consists of images accompanied by captions that are continued in extended footnotes at the back of the volume. There are digressions into such subjects as oyster dredges, Colonial medicine (“ ‘Tooth drawers’ sometimes used such painful practices as string pulling and hot coals to get teeth out”), and Colonial clockmaking. The shots of Delaware’s remarkable red brick buildings stand out, particularly one of a mist-shrouded State Capitol building in Dover. A late afternoon sun illuminates a mill perched on the icy banks of the Choptank River. Tabler also digs up some intriguing historical nuggets—Eleuthere Irenee du Pont de Nemours told his father he had situated the family’s gunpowder mill along Brandywine Creek in Wilmington after ruling out other possibilities in Maryland and Virginia because “the country, the people, the location are all worthless.” Brandywine Creek was so named because the Stidham family used its water to make an aquavit liqueur that, in Denmark and Sweden, is known as “Brændevin.” But the book’s structure is awkward, with readers having to jump to and fro between the picture captions and the continuations. And much of the text takes a plain, just-the-facts approach that becomes a bit enervating—“Duncan Beard (1740-1797) was both a clockmaker and silversmith....Beard was a charter member of the Masonic Union Lodge No. 5, chartered in 1765.” Still, the volume should appeal to regional history buffs and proud Delawareans.
A historical work with some striking images of distinctive Delaware buildings and a dry text.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2022
ISBN: 9798987000625
Page Count: 100
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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