Crack contemporary place writing, related in wrenching, enchanting detail. (4 maps)
The author of The Last River (2000) anatomizes another disastrous adventure in the unwelcoming outdoors: the1853–54 effort to discover a potential waterway through the isthmus of Panama.
It was the height of the canal era, and the canal that would cut through Panama would be the grandest yet: the rude weather of Cape Horn could be avoided, travel time to the gold fields of California cut in half, the whole world of shipping turned on its head. At the eastern end of Panama, in Darién, rumor of a gap through the mountains had hardened into belief. Here the land was only 40 miles wide, and 19th-century mapmakers avowed that “the mountains parted and the oceans all but kissed.” The US government sent the Darién Exploring Expedition, headed by Lieutenant Isaac Strain, to “lead a ‘speedy’ overland crossing of the isthmus in an attempt to map and survey the route.” It was anything but quick. The local Kuna population were evasive, worried about occupation of their land and reprisals for their ill treatment of an earlier expedition. But Strain thought he detected in their reticence a desire to hide the supposed gap’s location. Bad maps slowed the expedition’s progress, jungle damp fouled its scientific instruments, bloody flux and malaria felled its members. Strain was in way over his head even before he sailed into Caledonia Bay near Darién to find “mountains rising above mountains, a sea of dark peaks clothed in dark forests”—and no gap in sight. Balf pours on the historic doom and misery with such practiced ease that readers will not be surprised when a rescue party finally discovers Strain, weighing no more than 75 pounds, sporting a Panama hat, a tattered blue flannel shirt, one boot, and sores inflicted by burrowing insects. An epilogue recounts Balf’s own 2001 excursion to Darién and attests to the region’s utter wildness.
Crack contemporary place writing, related in wrenching, enchanting detail. (4 maps)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-60989-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2003
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 Yorkerstaff 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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