An optimistic book that downplays the clamorous work of environmental groups and attributes progress to the institutions of...
A wide-ranging history of the American environmental movement.
Allitt (American History/Emory Univ.; The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities Throughout American History, 2009, etc.) offers a readable account that will provoke and displease many environmentalists. Few of the issues facing the nation—from overpopulation in the 1950s to air and water pollution in the ’60s to genetically modified foods in the ’90s to climate change today—warranted the accompanying moods of crisis, which were “usually disproportionate to the actual danger involved.” Most problems were manageable, but they were exaggerated due to media sensationalism, environmental scientists seeking recognition, the needs of a growing environmental establishment and the beneficial effects of crises on environmental groups’ memberships. “When the nation mobilized the political will it was effective in providing remedies,” writes Allitt, celebrating actions on pesticides, toxic dumps, endangered species and other issues. However, he overlooks the fact that to mobilize political will, environmental groups had to fight for attention, waging information campaigns and sounding alarms, often in the face of strong, well-financed opposition, so that the public would eventually demand legislative action. Allitt’s things-will-take-care-of-themselves view, based on sympathy with counterenvironmentalists’ ideas, informs his book. He covers major individuals and controversies over six decades, showing how Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson created constituencies for mainstream environmentalism—a mass movement by 1970—and Edward Abbey inspired activists. Highly politicized issues pitted critics, who viewed green advocates as selfish elitists, against environmentalists who saw opponents as cynical and greedy. Allitt notes Congress passed 28 major environmental laws in the decade before 1980, when President Ronald Reagan began dismantling many regulations and sparked a conservative counterenvironmentalism. Allitt dismisses the “false” claims of impending catastrophe associated with climate change, which he deems “another real but manageable problem.”
An optimistic book that downplays the clamorous work of environmental groups and attributes progress to the institutions of democracy and capitalism.Pub Date: March 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59420-466-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
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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