A fluently written celebration of life, punctuated, as always, by death. Worthy of a place alongside Doug Peacock’s Grizzly...
Hunter/conservationist and Outside correspondent Rinella (The Scavenger’s Guide to Haute Cuisine, 2006) chases the last of the wild buffalo, turning up a fine tale in the process.
Readers inclined to things robust and outdoors will probably enjoy a narrative that begins, “In the past week I’ve become something of a buffalo chip connoisseur.” Granted, it’s no “Call me Ishmael,” but Rinella has his own object of mysterious, somewhat inexplicable quest, having once found at high altitude—9,000 snowy feet—the remains of a bison that he decided, armed with sentiment more than science, was alive on July 4, 1776. Buffalo meat, the author proudly notes, is the “real original American meal,” a fitting repast for such a holiday, and the object of hunters from antiquity until the massive 19th-century kill-off of what General Phil Sheridan called “the Indians’ commissary.” (On that note, Rinella reproduces a photograph of a white hunter standing atop a 30-foot-tall heap of buffalo skulls, which certainly gives one pause to wonder.) Searching for the opportunity to recapitulate that primordial hunt in a new age, Rinella embarks upon a modest quest that takes him, for instance, to the gates of media mogul Ted Turner’s Montana ranch, where “for $4,285 (a $500 savings from last year’s prices) I could hunt a trophy-sized bull inside a fenced enclosure,” about par with the prices at other buffalo ranches. Allowing that there’s nothing particularly ennobling or romantic in gunning down a penned animal, Rinella finally obtains a lottery ticket to hunt in Alaska, yielding a resolution that most certainly will not please PETA cardholders but that conservationists will admire—even as Rinella wrestles with the question, “How can I claim to love the very thing that I worked so hard to kill?”
A fluently written celebration of life, punctuated, as always, by death. Worthy of a place alongside Doug Peacock’s Grizzly Years (1990), Jack Turner’s The Abstract Wild (1996) and other meditations on the red-in-tooth-and-claw side of nature.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-385-52168-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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