Which is better, cornfields or clean coal? Stoll’s sharp book complicates our understanding of a much-misunderstood,...
A searching economic and political history of a dispossessed, impoverished Appalachia that progress has long eluded.
Alexis de Tocqueville may have insisted that there are no peasants in America, but Stoll (History/Fordham Univ.; The Great Delusion: A Mad Inventor, Death in the Tropics, and the Utopian Origins of Economic Growth, 2008, etc.) finds the term “a perfectly good word to describe a country person.” Moreover, as refugees from the enclosures of feudal and early modern Europe, the free “peasants” of Appalachia were able to find land—even if seized from others—and channel their own energies into whatever work they saw fit. That was early on, however. Following the incursions of the extractive industries of logging and mining, those free people suddenly were landless, essentially the property of the company. Stoll notes that the story of Appalachia is very much the story of world systems, with the region “fully part of an Atlantic and global expansion of capitalism.” In that winner-take-all system, places like the titular Ramp Hollow, a hamlet outside of Morgantown, West Virginia, that hosted a once-profitable coal seam, are used up and then abandoned. So are their people, as the log cabins of mountain dwellers gave way to tar-paper shanties, “just as a free and robust set of subsistence practices gave way to impoverishing wage labor.” Stoll’s resonant critique of capitalism takes many turns, examining the corn economy here and the money economy there as well as the backyard company-town garden as a free ride for the company, the rise and fall of agrarianism, and many other topics. The author closes with a friendly but pointed critique of J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy as blaming the victim for systemic failures, even as dispossession has served others “as an instrument of control, not a sign of progress.”
Which is better, cornfields or clean coal? Stoll’s sharp book complicates our understanding of a much-misunderstood, much-maligned region that deserves better than it has received.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8090-9505-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
