“One person can make a difference, indeed all the difference,” Punke writes in closing. Through Grinnell, he makes a...
Can predators save their prey from extinction? Yes, this lively book instructs, if they’re guided by a proper teacher.
The teacher, in callow George Grinnell’s case, was none other than Lucy Audubon, widow of the famed naturalist and artist, who ran a free-spirited school for the children of New York’s upper crust. Montana-based writer Punke’s (Fire and Brimstone, 2006, etc.) account opens as a rather slow-moving portrait of the gilded proto–Gilded Age, which Grinnell entered as a child of privilege, the son of a member of Cornelius Vanderbilt’s inner circle. That account gathers steam when Grinnell, after getting through Yale with much difficulty, finds a place on the scientific team of pioneering paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh and wanders west to gather dinosaur bones and—this being 1870—to shoot bison, whose herds were still big enough to halt their westward train. Audubon’s core philosophy, a blend of self-denial and delayed gratification, “ran directly counter to a core tenet of Gilded Age and robber baron belief,” writes Punke, namely “the ‘myth of inexhaustibility.’” The Great Plains were rapidly being emptied of bison, and Grinnell, though an avid hunter, recognized that something had to be done to stem the flow of blood. Soon he would use his skills as a writer and prairie diplomat to edit Forest and Stream magazine, mounting an early and influential attack on commercial hunting and, perhaps surprisingly, on “the strategy of killing the buffalo as a means of subjugating the Indians.” Punke does solid work in recounting Grinnell’s varied career as a writer, activist (he founded both the Audubon Society and, with Theodore Roosevelt, the Boone and Crockett Club) and environmentalist, but the heart of this book and its best part is the tale of how that career was put to use saving the bison from extinction—a decision that could have gone the other way in an instant.
“One person can make a difference, indeed all the difference,” Punke writes in closing. Through Grinnell, he makes a powerful case.Pub Date: June 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-089782-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
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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