Despite extensive research, this book is mainly for aficionados of the weird.
An offbeat investigation of how the source code for conspiracy theories was written long ago.
Charles Fort (1874-1932) is not a household name today, but his influence reaches deep into American life. In the early years of the 20th century, Fort began to collect newspaper articles about odd things or “anomalous reports”—e.g., rains of fish or stones, strange lights in the sky, contact with the dead, etc. Buhs, author of Bigfoot and The Fire Ant Wars, examines how Fort knitted these into a series of books about inexplicable occurrences and their possible meanings. Fort believed that they could explain the real nature of the universe, and he eventually expanded the theory into investigations of how power was really wielded in society. Things are never as they seem, he wrote, and there are worlds behind the world. His work and theories attracted a variety of followers; after his death, an organization called the Fortean Society sought to spread his ideas. For decades, sci-fi writers have drawn on Fortean thinking, and Buhs tracks the many paths of influence, especially involving groups obsessed with UFOs and vanished civilizations. Much of this was harmless quackery, but the rise of malevolent conspiracy theories was more pernicious. The result has been the infiltration of the bizarre and the extreme into civil discourse at every level (see: QAnon.) “Fort and Forteans played their part in the creation of this world,” says Buhs. “They eroded the distinctions between truth and falsity. They launched a thousand conspiracies into the national consciousness.” Unfortunately, the author often breaks the primary narrative with unnecessary detours, making it difficult to follow. Some will enjoy the arcane material, but many will find it too eccentric to keep the pages turning.
Despite extensive research, this book is mainly for aficionados of the weird.Pub Date: June 24, 2024
ISBN: 978-0226831480
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
A concise personal and scholarly history that avoids academic jargon as it illuminates emotional truths.
The Harvard historian and Texas native demonstrates what the holiday means to her and to the rest of the nation.
Initially celebrated primarily by Black Texans, Juneteenth refers to June 19, 1865, when a Union general arrived in Galveston to proclaim the end of slavery with the defeat of the Confederacy. If only history were that simple. In her latest, Gordon-Reed, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and numerous other honors, describes how Whites raged and committed violence against celebratory Blacks as racism in Texas and across the country continued to spread through segregation, Jim Crow laws, and separate-but-equal rationalizations. As Gordon-Reed amply shows in this smooth combination of memoir, essay, and history, such racism is by no means a thing of the past, even as Juneteenth has come to be celebrated by all of Texas and throughout the U.S. The Galveston announcement, notes the author, came well after the Emancipation Proclamation but before the ratification of the 13th Amendment. Though Gordon-Reed writes fondly of her native state, especially the strong familial ties and sense of community, she acknowledges her challenges as a woman of color in a state where “the image of Texas has a gender and a race: “Texas is a White man.” The author astutely explores “what that means for everyone who lives in Texas and is not a White man.” With all of its diversity and geographic expanse, Texas also has a singular history—as part of Mexico, as its own republic from 1836 to 1846, and as a place that “has connections to people of African descent that go back centuries.” All of this provides context for the uniqueness of this historical moment, which Gordon-Reed explores with her characteristic rigor and insight.
A concise personal and scholarly history that avoids academic jargon as it illuminates emotional truths.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63149-883-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
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