Kurlansky has been breezier in the past, a better stylistic choice for books with this level of detail to become absorbing...
Kurlansky (City Beasts: Fourteen Stories of Uninvited Wildlife, 2015, etc.), who chronicles world history and human advancement via one telling topic at a time, chooses paper for his latest undertaking.
“Wood, bark, grasses, cotton, silk, seaweed”—different societies at similar stages of intellectual development have all found substances, all containing cellulose, to fit their needs for the creation of writing materials. The widespread development of paper, though, came long after written language and the inventions of papyrus, parchment, and vellum. Kurlansky has a lot of history to sift through before he even gets to paper. Regarding paper’s significance, the author states his opinion fiercely: “improved writing material had to be found, because the needs of society demanded it.” This informs another aspect of his thesis, which is to disprove a “technological fallacy: the idea that technology changes society.” The narrative moves from ancient China to the Middle East, to Europe and then across the Atlantic, chronicling advancements from cuneiform to calligraphy, accounting systems to movable type, the Industrial Revolution to the modern digital age, all with a focus on proving that changes in society brought about the need for these advancements. To express the need for writing materials for the abstract thinkers of ancient Greece, Kurlansky straightforwardly states, “the memory devices of oral literature simply could not express what they wanted to say.” Or to reason why Europe developed printing technology much faster than Asian or Middle Eastern cultures: “they were societies in decline and didn’t really need printing.” The author effectively introduces the movement from one advancement to the next within the confines of a strong argument that never wavers, but the effect lacks personality. The most successful moments are specific stories of how paper and its relevant technologies became part of daily life—e.g., the “masterful drawings” of Michelangelo, which “were [found] folded up, with notes about the banal ephemera of everyday life jotted on the reverse side.”
Kurlansky has been breezier in the past, a better stylistic choice for books with this level of detail to become absorbing reads.Pub Date: May 17, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-393-23961-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
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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