An absorbing and revealing portrait of profound natural disaster.
A century of severe climate aberrations witnessed sweeping cultural change.
From 1570 to the 1680s, the average global temperature fell by about 2 degrees Celsius, causing changes in ocean currents and the salinity of seawater, the growth of polar ice caps and glaciers, and extreme weather events, such as storms, torrential rain, summer droughts, and relentless frosts. Drawing on rich sources, including diaries, letters, account ledgers, paintings, and religious sermons as well as data gleaned by climate historians and scientists, journalist and translator Blom (Fracture: Life and Culture in the West, 1918-1938, 2015, etc.) creates a vivid picture of the European landscape during the Little Ice Age and of social, political, and cultural changes that may have been accelerated by climate change. During this period, Europe saw “a move from feudal to capitalist societies, from the fortress to the market”; scientific experimentation and empirical observation ushered in the Enlightenment; an urban middle class grew; and the medieval concept of the cyclical model of economic life was replaced by the idea of “continuing economic growth based on exploitation.” At first, people explained the unremitting cold as God’s punishment for human wickedness: “Every earthquake, every volcanic eruption, and every storm was interpreted as an expression of divine will,” and weather sermons “became a minor literary genre of their own.” When hail, cold, and drought caused food shortages and high prices, suspicions about witchcraft “grew to monstrous proportions.” By 1600, one small Westfalian farming town burned 272 individuals as witches. Blom acknowledges that “religious tensions certainly played a role, but the correlation among extreme weather events, ruined harvests, and waves of witch trials asserts itself most forcefully.” Although he establishes convincingly that Europe “found new metaphors for thinking about itself” during the 17th century, the author is cautious about positing severe weather as a single cause of major cultural changes. Blom’s epilogue addresses contemporary global warming, which, unlike the Little Ice Age, will not spontaneously rectify itself; caused by humans, it requires dramatic, clearsighted human intervention.
An absorbing and revealing portrait of profound natural disaster.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63149-404-8
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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