A readable, fact-filled, well-written exploration of how roads work, for good and ill, and what their future likely holds.
From National Book Critics Circle Award winner Conover (Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, 2000, etc.), a long view of global trade, empire building, cultural collapse, disease vectors and all the other things that come with the installation of a road.
Even as the country fills with ever-wider highways—by some estimates, an area the size of Ohio is now given over to road asphalt—and the level of climate-changing particulates rises, other countries are rushing to add to their inventory of highways, especially aspiring China (which is “on course to equal us in cars” by about 2025) and India. “We’ve reached the point where it seems nowadays as though we’re paving the world,” writes the author, and “it is hard to build without destroying” Conover hops behind the windshield to have a look, traveling vertiginous roller-coaster routes in the Andes that would make a condor flinch, but that also act to bind distant communities and bring much-needed goods to far-flung corners of what used to be the Inca Empire—communities served, in many cases, by roads the Incas built more than half a millennium ago, and that are doing better than their macadam descendants. Such roads bring desired goods out of the remote vastness as well—Conover traces the course of a load of mahogany from rainforest to Park Avenue. Elsewhere the author gazes through road-weary eyes at the adaptations people in the Himalayas have made to an absence of good roads—glacial ones will do, until the glaciers melt—and at the role of trucks and truckers in spreading AIDS throughout Africa. He even braves road journeys through China, where the traffic mortality rate is among the highest in the world.
A readable, fact-filled, well-written exploration of how roads work, for good and ill, and what their future likely holds.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4244-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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