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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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