Good fun for fossil freaks.
An intriguing story of dinosaur smuggling.
New Yorker staff writer and National Magazine Award winner Williams debuts with an account of a 38-year-old American fossil hunter who, in 2012, sold the reassembled bones of a 24-foot-long T. bataar from Mongolia at auction in New York. The illicit $1 million sale—the skeleton was returned to Mongolia—marked the downfall of Eric Prokopi, a fossil enthusiast who had peddled specimens to museums and collectors for years. In this densely detailed, wide-ranging narrative, the author uses the taciturn and constantly cash-short Prokopi’s adventures in bone-hunting as a window on the world of fossil collecting. Dinosaurs roamed the Earth for 165 million years, but it was only recently, in 1994, that the first natural history auction occurred, creating heightened interest among wealthy buyers and providing cover for the sale of illegal fossils and forgeries. Williams delves into all aspects of the fossil business, from explorations in the Gobi Desert to Tucson’s innumerable trade shows to natural history “field clubs” to the frequent conflicts between scientists and commercial dealers. She describes a colorful array of paleontologists, tradesmen, and hobbyists, including pipe insulator Frank Garcia, who unearthed the richest Pleistocene fossil bed in North America, and the celebrated Indiana Jones–like explorer-zoologist Roy Chapman Andrews, who became a 1920s hero after discovering dinosaur eggs. The flow of her story of science and crime is sometimes interrupted—rather than enhanced—by lengthy descriptions of people and events. Passages about Prokopi’s dribbling wine down his shirt at an auction preview and his wife’s penchant for house-flipping convey little beyond the need for editing. At other times, the author’s deep reporting yields memorable passages on desert car caravans and the assembly of dinosaur skeletons. She brings to life an unlikely mix of museum officials and bone salesmen as well as the single-minded pursuit of “income and adventure” that drove her smuggler-protagonist to Mongolia in the service of paleontology and profit.
Good fun for fossil freaks.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-38253-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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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