A broad survey of the prehistoric cultures of present-day Canada and the US. Pringle, a Canadian museum researcher, has had long experience working in the field, experience that she brings to bear in discussing patterns of trade, settlement, and daily life among ancient cultures as diverse as the little-known fishing peoples of Eel Point, Calif., and the heavily studied mound-building peoples of the Ohio River Valley. As a look at the ways in which archaeologists puzzle out problems—for instance, why a seemingly complicated system of class stratification would take root among the technologically simple Keatley Creek salmon fishers of British Columbia—Pringle's book has several virtues. She is adept at discussing how artifactual evidence is weighed and used, and she provides good coverage of Canada, which receives too little attention in survey texts in archaeology. However, she makes a few simplistic claims on matters that are still wide open to debate, arguing, for instance, that a particular Chaco Canyon dwelling was likely used for ceremonial purposes, when most specialists in Southwestern prehistory are busy dismantling the long-held view that the ancient Anasazi were an overly ritualistic people. (Her statement, too, that ``archaeology is a hard science'' is one most specialists would take issue with.) A larger problem is Pringle's uninspired narrative style, which is not helped by her attempts to provide color (``Rumpled and unshaven, with gold-rimmed glasses, bushy mustache, and long, dark hair combed straight back, the fifty-four-year-old scientist looks every bit the old Yukon hand, a character straight from the pages of Robert Service.'') Purists will object to the lack of coverage of Mexico, which is, of course, part of North America and offers plenty of archaeological problems that would lend themselves to discussion here. (26 b&w photos, 8 pages color photos, not seen)
Pub Date: May 17, 1996
ISBN: 0-471-04237-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1996
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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