An important look at the staggering human and environmental costs of mining.
Bloomsbury Review contributing editor Biggers (In the Sierra Madre, 2006, etc.) takes on Big Coal in this enriching history.
The author’s forebears hailed from Eagle Creek, Ill., tucked away in the Shawnee National Forest and rich in several coal veins, now devastated by strip mining. By 1998 the last relation had sold what was left of the homestead to the encroaching coal company, which was relentlessly blasting the surrounding hills until it resembled “the scene of a crime.” Biggers aims at the root of the wrong-headed decisions over the last two centuries, which allowed southern Illinois, called the “Saudi Arabia of coal,” to reach such a desperate pass. The author moves between the big and the small picture. After noting that 42 to 45 percent of the U.S. electrical needs are supplied by coal and that over 40 percent of CO2 emissions come from coal-fired plants, he fashions affecting memories of his miner grandfather who died from black lung. Biggers addresses stereotypes of the hillbilly in these so-called Illinois Ozarks, which suffer from the same economic and social blights as Appalachia, and examines local efforts to organize a Shawnee Indian settlement, after they were driven out by the strip miners in the 1960s. He also excavates the lost early history of the use of African slaves and Native Americans to work the salt and mineral mines of Illinois and Missouri. Biggers delves into the fascinating legacy of the union organizers such as Mother Jones, John L. Lewis and Agnes Burns Wieck, the progressive movement and the explosion of mine accidents that accompanied the height of production in the 1910s and ’20s, and he considers the oxymoron “clean coal” and the “boondoggle” FutureGen as further ways to disguise the “dirty realities” of coal.
An important look at the staggering human and environmental costs of mining.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-56858-421-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2009
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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