A lush, labor-of-love appreciation of maritime California.
A broad, insightful exploration of the Golden State’s pristine coastline and its social and ecological impact on the nation.
Award-winning journalist and environmental documentarian Helvarg (Saved By the Sea: A Love Story with Fish, 2010, etc.) incorporates his work as an ocean conservationist into this examination of the California coast. There’s a distinct passion evident in the author’s language as he writes about his home state, a populous land boasting more than 1,000 miles of “urban ocean and hidden wilderness coves, precipitous coastal cliffs, sea stacks and wild beaches.” Conveyed through interviews with commercial fishermen and scientists and excursions up and down the coast, Helvarg enthusiastically probes the heritage of California’s coastal tribes, its whaling and surfing legacies, and its vital symbiosis with the U.S. Navy—a fact, he writes, that many Southern Californians overlook. The author’s research included early morning excursions aboard marine container ships, diving boats and underwater exploratory science vessels, and he accompanied the San Diego Coast Guard’s nightly migrant patrol to scan for smugglers. Helvarg avoids debating the more usurious aspects of the California lifestyle in favor of praising its “biological richness and diversity, a hallmark of its coast and climate.” The author creates a detailed, handsome history lesson annotated with authoritative commentary on waterside conservation and preservation and climate awareness. In a cautionary final chapter, Helvarg warns of rising sea levels, a genuine ecological menace threatening the beauty and significance of California’s coastal landscapes.
A lush, labor-of-love appreciation of maritime California.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-312-66496-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
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
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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