An old way of thinking about the ownership of art and ideas smartly revived.
A MacArthur Fellow constructs an elegant argument opposing the modern drive to privatize our common cultural heritage.
Relying heavily on available scraps of knowledge and expression in the culture surrounding them to fashion their ballads and sermons, could a songwriter like Bob Dylan or a preacher like Martin Luther King Jr. emerge today, where the range of “private” property has been extended and the public domain has shrunk? Human knowledge, Hyde (Art and Politics/Kenyon College; Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art, 1998, etc.) writes, is different from physical property. It’s more usefully compared to an 18th-century agricultural commons, where a bundle of rights, institutions and customs preserved the land for communal use. Just as the first enclosure movement walled off the land and converted it to private use, so too further enclosures—an extension of copyright and patent carrying a presumption of exclusion, an impulse to privatize academic science, drinking water, seeds, naturally occurring antibiotics, even words like “I have a dream”—threaten to choke off public discourse and creativity. Against the push of monied interests, especially the entertainment and biotech industries, Hyde marshals an unexpected and particularly eloquent lobby: America’s founders, including Adams, Jefferson, Madison and Franklin, all of whom took an expansive view about claims to cultural ownership. They championed a civic republicanism, where property was not an end in itself, but rather a precondition for freeing the individual “to produce something for the common Benefit,” as Franklin wrote. Loathing monopoly and rejecting the notions of isolated genius, the founders understood creative work as collaborative and dependent on the free flow of ideas. “Intellectual property,” the relatively new term lawyers assign to the intangible creations of the human mind and imagination, would hardly seem the matter for a book as revelatory and engaging as Hyde produces here, but citizens of a democracy relinquish this topic to free-market buccaneers at our own peril.
An old way of thinking about the ownership of art and ideas smartly revived.Pub Date: Aug. 24, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-374-22313-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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