A capably drawn portrait of an iconic American place that remains of world significance.
History of the exploration of the Yellowstone River country and its establishment as the world’s first national park.
Yellowstone, writes Gettysburg College environmental studies professor Wilson, “is remarkably distant from just about everywhere and everyone else in the continental United States.” For all that, it draws 4 million visitors a year. It was always remote, little settled by Indigenous people until relatively recently. Early on, an American explorer with a background in geology, a junior Army officer named Gustavus Cheyney Doane, recognized that Yellowstone was a vast caldera formed by ancient volcanic action; by Wilson’s reckoning, the “largest recorded eruption in human history,” that of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora, blasted out just 6% of the volcanic debris that Yellowstone’s last eruption did—and, as catastrophists are fond of pointing out, Yellowstone is long overdue for another. Wilson’s early explorers made for a hardy breed, though strange: The Sioux who encountered one geologist at work must have thought he was crazy for carrying a backpack full of stones, and they left him alone for it—adds Wilson, “In human cultures across the world, mental illness (real or imagined) is often cause for compassion rather than hostility.” Although cattle ranchers and miners resisted the effort, Yellowstone finally became a national park, helped along in the end, Wilson reckons, by a strain of 19th-century Romanticism that held that nature “offered humans a path to moral and spiritual well-being and deserved respect for its own sake.” Surprisingly, magnate John D. Rockefeller, as Wilson shows, was highly instrumental in protecting the park. Bedeviling park naturalists then and now was how to balance human visitation with protection for wild animals, who today include restored populations of wolves, grizzly bears, bison, and other creatures.
A capably drawn portrait of an iconic American place that remains of world significance.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9781640096653
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024
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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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