A vivid, deeply informed travelogue.
A storied mountain range reflects its tumultuous history.
Journalist and novelist Carr (The Devils of Cordona, 2016, etc.) mines a prodigious number of memoirs, travelogues, histories, and literary works to create a richly textured examination of a liminal region: the mountainous border between Spain and France. The Pyrenees, he writes, “are a mirror of our world, with all its follies, tragedies, cruelties, and absurdities.” Unlike other mountain ranges, which are seen as physical barriers to invaders and obstacles for travelers, the Pyrenees have been depicted “as a savage and inhuman wilderness,” “the dividing line between Europe and an Africanized Iberia.” The stark, rugged area has long attracted artists, poets, and writers inspired by the striking wonder of the landscape, as well as naturalists who engaged in geological, botanical, archaeological, and zoological exploration. Throughout the 19th century, when strenuous tourism became popular, climbers and hikers combed the peaks in search of the dramatic and picturesque. In 1874, the French Alpine Club built a chain of refuges and shelters to house tourists, and in the early 20th century, the first guidebooks began to appear. Besides chronicling the advent of tourism, Carr offers a detailed history of the significance of the Pyrenees as a military barrier: In 218 B.C.E., for example, Hannibal took an army of nearly 60,000 troops, and 36 elephants, across the Pyrenees to avoid confronting the Roman army. The mountains served as a refuge and escape route as far back as the eighth century, when Spanish Christians fled to escape Moorish invaders; later, Jews fled from French persecution; and during the Spanish Civil War and both world wars, the mountains offered hiding places and strategic posts. Arts and crafts have flourished in various mountain towns; mining and metallurgy in others; and “health tourism” has made the Pyrenees a popular recreational landscape, as has the area’s mystical reputation. The market town of Lourdes, the author notes, is one among several sites for religious pilgrimages.
A vivid, deeply informed travelogue.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62097-427-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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 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
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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