A captivating homage to a wilderness sanctuary marked but not spoiled by human presence.
Generations of inhabitants who revered and defended a sylvan California setting are commemorated in Brovarney’s nonfiction history.
The author, a former curator at the Grace Hudson Museum in Ukiah, California, celebrates Lake Leonard, a pristine body of water nestled amid the mountains and streams of Reeves Canyon in Mendocino County. She begins by surveying the natural history of the area, which is dominated by old-growth redwood trees big enough to generate their own microclimates and shelter a menagerie of fauna, from salamanders to mountain lions. She also discusses the local Pomo Indian culture. Brovarney then profiles the families who owned Lake Leonard and its environs from the 19th century to the present, focusing on two iconic women. The first is Una Boyle, who summered at the lake as a girl and lived there full time for 30 years, beginning in 1921; she escaped from a convent at the age of 13 and later became an amateur rodeo rider. The second is Boyle’s neighbor Hazel Dickinson Putnam, a riding instructor who greeted trespassers on her 200 acres with a loaded gun and lived by the motto, “I don’t shoot to threaten, I shoot to kill.” The author sets these stories against the inexorable encroachment of logging into the area, which obliterated surrounding forests but spared Lake Leonard’s vicinity thanks to its proprietors’ conservationist efforts (one owner saved a favorite redwood by telling the lumberjacks that it was on her land—and then bought the property the next day). Brovarney deftly mixes regional history, ecology, and character studies of people who shaped and were shaped by the land, writing in lucid, workmanlike prose dotted with flights of vivid lyricism: “An ancient redwood forest dwells deep in our sense long after we leave it—a cool stillness, the pungent sweet-citrus scent born of sun-heated sap, soft duff underfoot, duskiness broken by slender streams of light, the crystalline song of a hermit thrush.” The book’s many photos, some a century old, give an equally evocative sense of the primeval forest, its vast, corrugated redwoods dwarfing the people beside them.
A captivating homage to a wilderness sanctuary marked but not spoiled by human presence.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9798218021429
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Landcestry
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
