A rewarding journey across a continent and into the author’s own past.
In this debut memoir, an education specialist travels across America and asks people, “If you could ask everyone you met just one question, what would you ask?”
Sassaman, after dropping out of college, was persuaded by his father to sign-up for the outdoor-education program Outward Bound. There, a wilderness instructor challenged him to meditate on one big question per day. Years later, after getting a master’s degree in education from Harvard University, Sassaman was still asking questions. He traveled, tracing an ellipse from Boston to San Francisco and back, and meditated on “Basic questions, like the kind you ask yourself in at the end of high school, or throughout college. What does it all mean? How are we connected to each other?” He met friends along the way, old and new, and they told him the questions they’d like to ask people. (It’s entirely possible to skip straight to the end of the book to see all 745 answers, but more patient readers will enjoy the larger story that Sassaman tells.) “Have you lived your life to the fullest?” asks a young student on a wilderness adventure. “Are you willing to die?” challenges a 12-year-old living off the grid in Arizona. A BBC reporter at Burning Man in Nevada wonders, “What is your ultimate goal for happiness?” Not every one of Sassaman’s encounters went according to plan, though. On his way back east, for example, an old friend angrily confronted him: “Here’s my suspicion,” he said. “You don’t actually have an answer for yourself…for your own stupid project!” Readers may wonder the same. Also, plenty of people opted not to engage him (“Usually when people said, ‘I’ll get back to you on that one,’ it meant: ‘I will not be getting back to you,’ ” he notes). But Sassaman was dogged in his pursuit and unsparing in his self-examination. Readers learn as much about his own checkered past and accompanying guilt as they do about the country through which he travels, and that’s as it should be—this is a memoir, after all. However, it’s a rare example of a personal story that raises more questions than it answers, and deliberately so. As readers turn the pages, they’ll inevitably find themselves trying to answer their own version of Sassaman’s question.
A rewarding journey across a continent and into the author’s own past.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Pants Press
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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