More intelligent history than breathless sea adventure.
Nichols (A Voyage for Madmen, 2001, etc.) fashions a somewhat scattershot but engaging narrative around the waning days of America’s whaling industry and its crash in the Artic by 1871.
The author traces the spectacular rise and fall of the Massachusetts whaling industry through the success and failure of several entrepreneurial families and merchants, particularly Quaker communities in Nantucket and New Bedford, who formed “the world’s first oil hegemony.” Nichols surveys the establishment of Nantucket’s whaling industry thanks to the good sense and enterprise of a handful of recalcitrant Quakers in the mid-17th century. These independent-minded early settlers observed the Indians’ method of capturing migratory whales on shore, before the fisheries invented deep-sea whaling voyages which essentially emptied the seas of whales by the mid-18th century and forced the hunters to prowl farther afield, in the Pacific and Arctic oceans. In his erratically organized but still fascinating tale, Nichols focuses on the vast whaling fortunes of merchants like the Howland brothers of New Bedford, who outfitted many of the fanciest whaleships of the time and sent them off to the Artic, commanded by valiant captains like Thomas Williams of the Monticello. In the spring of 1871, more than 30 whaleships were abandoned in the packed ice after they were lured by the deceptively benign seasons of past seasons. The incalculable loss spelled the end of the industry, exhausted by overhunting of whales and walrus and disrupted by the Civil War. In addition, whaling had devastated the ecosystem, causing widespread starvation among the Eskimo people. Furthermore, rock oil had been discovered in Pennsylvania, and the cotton mills offered a more reliable, less perilous living to many former whalers. Nichols’s account is packed primary voices—e.g., the diaries of Williams’s wife and daughter, who accompanied him on his fateful voyages—but the historical background eventually becomes more prominent than the thrills at sea.
More intelligent history than breathless sea adventure.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-399-15602-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2009
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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