A sprawling record of a unique adventure.
A chronicle of the author’s 12-week, 650-mile journey, on foot, from San Diego to San Francisco, tracing a Spanish expedition of 64 men and 50 mules led by Capt. Gaspar de Portolá from July 14 to Nov. 6, 1769.
As journalist and essayist Neely (Coast Range: A Collection From the Pacific Edge, 2016) writes, the party was tasked with mapping Monterey Bay, which Spain saw as a strategic outpost, and determining sites for future Catholic missions to convert some 300,000 natives and help the nation hold coveted territory. Several members of Portolá’s expedition kept journals to which the author refers frequently as he compares his own journey with that of his predecessors. Neely’s task has no international consequences: He just wanted to get acquainted with the land, and he shares his experiences in meticulous, sometimes overwhelming detail. Throughout the narrative, the author offers precise and often lyrical descriptions of landscapes and vistas, sky and sea, flora and fauna. He recounts his conversations, the food he ate, fences and No Trespassing warnings that impeded him, menacing traffic, signs of urban blight (graffiti, dumpsters, dumped trash), and surprising insect life: a tarantula as big as his palm, for example, with bristles “tinged with red, especially on its bulbous abdomen.” He was also bitten, between his toes, by big ants as he nestled in his sleeping bag. Along the way, Neely inevitably encountered tourist sites. At Mission San Juan Capistrano, for example, he notes the “commercialization and fetishization of California’s missions, trafficking in mystique and fantasy.” He visited the La Brea Tar Pits Museum, where he engaged with an interactive display inviting him to “Discover what it’s like to be trapped in tar.” He also saw evidence of opulent wealth at the Getty Museum, which conveys “a sepulchral feel, as if Getty’s bones were hidden behind some unidentified stone block,” and the grand 165-room Hearst Castle, which overlooks “the gilded, retina-burning Pacific.”
A sprawling record of a unique adventure.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64009-165-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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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