Ingenious, insightful, and disturbing.
An intense exploration of the fundamental transformations that led to the modern world.
Historian Smil begins with population transitions before moving on to agriculture, energy, economics, and environments. All premodern societies had high birth and death rates and slow population growth. Improved food production in the 18th century and sanitary and medical advances reduced death rates, but birth rates remained high until entire societies felt secure. The result was a period of hyperbolic growth after World War II that peaked in the 1960s. Today, except for Pakistan, Yemen, Bolivia, and sub-Saharan Africa, population growth is low, and some nations, such as Japan and Russia, are shrinking. Though modern agriculture has become massively efficient, it depends far more on fossil fuel and chemicals than sunlight and rain. Smil maintains that the greatest economic impact on human life is the gasoline-fueled internal combustion engine. By 1929, it provided 88% of America’s mechanical power. “Electrification,” writes the author, “has…been partially a transition within a transition (from direct uses to an indirect exploitation of fossil fuels)” and is “perhaps the most important of all transformative processes originating from technical innovations: ‘electric’ might be the single most important adjective used to describe the functioning of modern societies.” Readers will encounter the usual bad news about the environment—e.g., the burning of fossil fuels provided 91% of Earth’s energy in 1992; by 2017, it was…91%)—but Smil’s focus on facts and recent history situates him in a moderate position between catastrophists and those who tout a future of “general and unstoppable improvement.” The author mostly (but not entirely) avoids turgid academic prose, and he isn’t shy about delivering information, often overwhelming readers with facts, statistics, and analyses. The result is an expert portrait of spectacular technical and economic advances that many in the 21st century enjoy but which exclude large segments of the population and are creating problems that may or may not be solvable.
Ingenious, insightful, and disturbing.Pub Date: March 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-19-006066-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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