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MILK OF PARADISE

A HISTORY OF OPIUM

A well-crafted history of civilization seen through the prism of one of the most profitable agricultural products in human...

A sweeping, panoramic history of opium and its deep roots in a vast array of societies and cultures.

Inglis (Crow Mountain, 2016, etc.) opens with an observation from Thomas Jefferson, who noted, “merchants know no country,” and ends with her own trenchant observation that the war on opium is endless. In between is a story that stretches across 5,000 years of history and touches nearly every part of human civilization. The author begins in the Fertile Crescent and then traces the cultivation of opium through the Bronze Age, the Greek and Roman civilizations (“Homeric references to the opium poppy are concerned with the need for emotional oblivion, but Greek scholars were also discovering its many medicinal properties”), the Renaissance, the disastrous Opium Wars, and the creation of Hong Kong. Inglis’ history is not only wide, but deep due to her keen analysis of how entrenched opium is in modern culture in everything, from medicine to war to addiction to commerce. In the second half of the book, the author covers the isolation of morphine from opium and how new discoveries transformed the West. The third part of the book brings us quickly to today, focusing on the ready availability of professionally produced heroin, the explosion of big pharma, and the markets that have created “Generation Oxy.” If there’s one message to take from this history, it’s that prohibition doesn’t work. As Inglis notes, whether it’s crimes committed by gangsters or strategies rolled out by massive pharmaceutical companies, this gift from the natural world to ease pain and suffering has become a commodity. She ends where she began: “Within all of these parameters, economies are built, both legal and illegal, petty and international. And whether they be sidewalk dope dealers or pharmaceutical giants, merchants know no country, just as the search for even a glimpse of paradise is constant and without end.”

A well-crafted history of civilization seen through the prism of one of the most profitable agricultural products in human history.

Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-64313-055-2

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Pegasus

Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Awards & Accolades

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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

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

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

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