A wild ride well worth taking, though readers may want to portage around some of the narrative rapids.
Another chockablock, environmentally focused, ambitious volume from Schneider (Bonnie and Clyde: The Lives Behind the Legend, 2010, etc.).
To keep his portrait of the mighty Mississippi from becoming unnavigable, the author alternates chapters of dense chronological history with tales of canoe meanderings along the river with his son. This personal approach allows the author to skim over the stultifying details of the numerous wars along the river's shores between white colonizers and Native American inhabitants, as well as most Mississippi-related Civil War battles. Schneider aims to seize the river's essence: what it meant to the people who lived near it and used it for transportation, livelihood, industry and pleasure. The Mississippi watershed is not the longest river in the U.S. (that distinction goes to the Missouri), but it feeds tributaries to 41 percent of the continental U.S. Moreover, the author delineates fondly, the Mississippi has proved instrumental in prodding the nation to its ultimate destiny. The river was the gateway to new territories in the West; their settlement sparked the debate over slave and free states that was one of the causes of the Civil War. People living alongside the river crafted the nation's defining cultural forms, including African-American jazz and blues and Mark Twain's salty prose. Schneider marks the Mississippi’s slow transformation from a watering hole for mastodons and the Native American makers of effigy mounds to a staging ground for the explorations of first the Spanish and then the French, all looking for a way to the Pacific. The murky journey to the present day is not exactly merry, fraught by disasters both natural and man-made, but at least the federal government’s passage of the Clean Water Act of 1972 provided tools for better stewardship in the future—though the 2010 BP spill suggests those tools are laid aside as often as wielded.
A wild ride well worth taking, though readers may want to portage around some of the narrative rapids.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9136-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
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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