Almost breezy, but packed with relevant perspectives.
Cook takes a break from his specialty (Near Eastern Studies/Princeton) to assuage his hunger for historical overview.
The author frames his survey of the development of societies and civilizations with one overarching question: Why did human history happen the way it did? The lapse of bitter Pleistocene ice ages in favor of the Holocene warmth in which we still bask is an easy factor to isolate, but he goes on to do a creditable job of addressing other aspects of the same question in nearly global terms, continent by continent and society by society. A crisp, informal style lets him address the latest interdisciplinary thinking without ponderous accrual. Cook notes, for example, that DNA studies not only illuminate the trail of human descent with new clarity, but do the same for plants that became the breakfast-of-champions civilizations, such as wheat, now known to have been first domesticated some eleven thousand years ago in a discrete region of Turkey. Relishing the surprises and oddities that line history’s march, the author lavishes them on the reader. A Phoenician script that supposedly died with Carthage in the second century b.c. is still employed in North Africa, where the Tuareg people have handed it down exclusively from woman to woman. Well aware that politics is an ancient art, Cook suggests Buddhist monks gained firm footing in India due to “the patronage of rulers who found them no less eligible than Brahmins as providers of the religious endorsement without which it is hard for a king to look good.” When he does wax academically precise, as in explaining Mesoamerican calendars in which years have a bad habit of repeating themselves, or discombobulated East African tribal rituals that wind up initiating toddlers along with octogenarians, Cook has a point: Humans in groups may tend to persist with their own devices even in the face of systems that work better.
Almost breezy, but packed with relevant perspectives.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-393-05231-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
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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