Still, “drive through the region’s strip-mall hellscapes,” Grunwald concludes, and it’s clear that much remains to be done...
A lively appreciation of the Everglades as an ecosystem worthy of care and protection—quite a turnaround in attitude, as Washington Post reporter Grunwald reveals.
The natural Everglades encompasses an area twice the size of New Jersey, and it lacks both immediately spectacular features and elevation: One “pass” there is marked at a mere three feet above sea level. Yet huge quantities of freshwater slowly roll down the Everglades; as Grunwald writes, “a raindrop that fell in its headwaters in central Florida could have taken an entire year to dribble down to its estuaries at the tip of the peninsula.” Nineteenth-century white explorers damned the “Sea of Grass” for its heat, mosquitoes, vast store of reptiles, renegade Indians and runaway slaves, but speculators and capitalists came along who recognized a couple of salient facts: Rich in organic peat, the Everglades could be an agricultural paradise, and it could sustain whole cities. All that was needed was to remake the place entirely—drain the swamps, build vast canals and railroads, divide it into cozy lots. Grunwald’s account of the con games and fly-by-nights that made modern South Florida possible is a learned entertainment, though it becomes somewhat less amusing once it’s known that the same actors and forces are in play today; one illustrative moment comes when Jeb Bush, governor of Florida and brother of the president, came close to selling off Florida’s water rights in the Everglades for the pittance offered by a little company called Azurix, “an aggressive new player in the $400 billion global water market”—and, as it happens, a subsidiary of Enron. Happily, the deal didn’t go through. More happily still, Grunwald writes that many wide-ranging measures to help restore the Everglades have been successful.
Still, “drive through the region’s strip-mall hellscapes,” Grunwald concludes, and it’s clear that much remains to be done to save the Everglades. This lucid history and call to arms is an essential companion to that work.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-5105-9
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2006
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 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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