A fine, readable work of advocacy journalism, of a piece with Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert, that deserves to inform...
A gimlet-eyed look at the place of the wild horse in the landscape of the American West and at the poor legacy of human relations with that spirited animal.
If you do not live in the mountain West, you might not know that a fierce controversy rages over wild horses, or mustangs, on public lands and whether they should be removed and, in some cases, exterminated. Ranchers, as Colorado-based New York Times reporter Philipps (Lethal Warriors: When the New Band of Brothers Came Home, 2010) writes, are vocal in their hatred of both the federal agencies in charge of those lands and of the wild horses: “Mention mustangs in almost any small-town bar or café and prepare for an earful.” Lifting the argument a notch or two above where it usually rests, the author examines the natural history of these wild creatures—feral, their ancestors long-ago domesticated horses that escaped and formed their own herds—writing that while they may look a little scruffy, they are prized for intelligence and stamina: “The desert prunes any deficiencies.” Traveling through mustang country, Philipps considers a long history of mismanagement on the part of the federal government, based on rather haphazard roundups for most of the last half-century, with halfhearted efforts at adoption. When left to their own devices, ranchers have followed a program of trapping wild horses, selecting the best to incorporate into their herds, and then—well, one Nevada rancher tells the author, “we would chicken feed whatever nobody wanted.” Philipps proposes that we recognize the mustang, as with other wild species, as an animal that has a people problem, not the other way around, adding that some of the old saws about mustangs are inaccurate: it’s not true, for instance, that they lack natural predators, since mountain lions are vigorous in culling the herd.
A fine, readable work of advocacy journalism, of a piece with Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert, that deserves to inform discussion about the mustang issue as it plays out in courts and in Congress.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-24713-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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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