Enlightening saga of tough men, tough times, persistent corruption and greed.
The nation’s worst hard-rock mining disaster serves as a focal point for examining the mixed legacy of Big Copper.
U.S. mining tragedies of recent years have a way to go to compare with the disaster that took 163 lives beginning on June 8, 1917, outside of Butte, Mont. Miners at what was called “the world’s richest hill” had been working for years at up to a half-mile below ground (plus equal or greater lateral distances from the nearest vertical shaft), extracting precious metal and copper ores; most were in the employ of the giant Anaconda Company, owned by the Rockefeller minions of Standard Oil, but the accidental fire was started in a North Butte Mining Co. (long defunct) shaft. A former Washington lawyer and a novelist (The Revenant, 2002), Punke pores through the records to detail aspects of heroics and tragedy; men died from burns, suffocation (including carbon monoxide), some were scalded to death and possibly even drowned as water was poured into the mine to quench the blazing timbers. Because Anaconda had lately sealed off a number of passages, bodies were found with fingers scraped to the bone, the victims’ “certain” escape cut off. The disaster is the author’s point of departure for an extended look at the impact of mining—primarily of copper—on Butte itself, the state of Montana and the nation. Ensuing labor unrest on the eve of World War I, for instance, was viciously suppressed by industry barons, with government in their pockets, leading to violence and hysteria. Economic depression followed as Butte’s ores were depleted, leaving the city with today’s giant toxic lake—the pathetic last vestige of pit-mining.
Enlightening saga of tough men, tough times, persistent corruption and greed.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2006
ISBN: 1-4013-0155-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2006
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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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