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 Yorkerstaff 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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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