A trainer with two stolen elephants eludes a police search for five years. Murray Hill was well known in the fraternity of animal trainers—he had been on the road for 30 years with elephants, in circuses, movies, and TV commercials. In 1980, deciding to retire, he reluctantly put his last two elephants—females named Duchess and Tory—up for sale. Hill had brought them to his Missouri farm 16 years earlier; one had been 30 inches high and had been on a bottle her first two years. When father-and-son Californians Dick and Eddie Drake made an offer—$100,000 for the elephants and their specially built trailer—Hill called cronies and was told that the Drakes were good with animals. Financing the purchase, he stipulated that the Drakes were not to mistreat the elephants. When the Drakes fell a number of payments behind, Hill went to collect and found both elephants nervous and frightened, suffering from infected hook wounds (Hill himself controlled them entirely with verbal commands) and foot rot. Under cover of night, Hill drove away with the elephants. When Drake sued and a judge ruled that Hill had to return the animals, Hill went into hiding rather than see ``the girls'' abused. The story of Hill's five fugitive years is expertly told here by novelist Ross (Tears of the Moon, 1988), who also reveals much that is fascinating about Hill's world: how elephants are trained; how periodic testosterone floods turn bull elephants into killers; how African and Asian elephants differ; and, most vividly (as seen through Hill's diary), how Duchess and Tory each boasted an idiosyncratic personality. Eventually, the FBI traced Hill to a Texas farm; Duchess and Tory were given to the Drakes, and Hill was tried for theft. A thoughtful adventure not only for animal lovers but for anyone who enjoys offbeat tales. (Film rights sold; eight pages of b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: May 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-679-40937-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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