A masterful history of a place that is both reality and ideal, and central to the modern world.
A sweeping survey of the Golden State over the last 12,000 or so years.
It’s not easy to compress the history of Delaware, much less the vast realm of California, in under 500 pages. Yale professor Faragher, author of many books about American history, succeeds admirably. His underlying theme is diversity. California “includes more variation in climate than any other,” and it also encompasses 178 major habitat types, 109 federally recognized Native American tribes and bands, and people from all over the world (for which reason Los Angeles alone, it’s estimated, has more than 500 Salvadoran restaurants). Faragher is quick to add that diversity has not always been positive. Economic inequality is perhaps nowhere more pronounced, at least within the bounds of the U.S., and California has given birth to the most progressive and the most retrograde political traditions, which Faragher illustrates by contrasting Govs. Earl Warren and Ronald Reagan. The author tackles numerous controversial and unpleasant issues head-on, from the dispossession and murder of countless Indigenous people to the long tradition of police brutality symbolized by the vicious 1991 attack on Rodney King and the subsequent realization that “the LAPD was an authority unto itself.” One theme that might have used a few more pages is the profound division—political, economic, and cultural—between rural and urban California, which might as well be separate nations, marked by what the late Joan Didion described as “rancorous differences in attitude and culture.” Wobblies, Black Panthers, Forty-Niners, conquistadors, and Native peoples all appear in Faragher’s vigorous narrative, both a celebration of the state’s wealth and creativity and acknowledgment that so much of its history is marked by “conflict, turmoil, and violence.” Though this book may not supplant Kevin Starr’s multivolume history of California, it makes a valuable complement, highly readable and with a compelling governing argument.
A masterful history of a place that is both reality and ideal, and central to the modern world.Pub Date: April 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-300-22579-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2022
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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