In two papers (delivered at Baylor in 1982) and 61 pellucid pages, McNeill (The Rise of the West, Plagues and Peoples, The Human Condition) revives and renews Walter Prescott Webb's thesis that European expansion created a Great Frontier around the globe—where not only progress, freedom, and equality prevailed, but also destruction, compulsion, and slavery: "the persistent double-edgeness of change." The aim is to rid us of provincialism—put "the States back into the world as one of a family of peoples and nations similarly situated"—and also to expose the "romantic delusion" of an Arcadian past. The evidence derives from McNeill's unsurpassed knowledge of steppe and veldt and Outback, of disease and demographics, of transportation, communication, agriculture, and trade—in which he perceives patterns. The two papers divide at 1750. In the two centuries before, the Europeans' diseases ("epidemiological superiority"), combined with their "greater or lesser superiority of skills," destroyed native populations (in the US, USSR, Latin America); the resulting labor shortage, for agricultural or mineral production, brought recourse to compulsory labor (slaves, serfs, indentured servants, peons); "the arts and skills of civilization" made little headway. After 1750, however, transportation and communication links grew—and, most crucially, population soared. (McNeill reviews the possible reasons—with particular attention to the spread of American food crops, like potatoes and peanuts, yielding "more calories per acre than anything grown before.") When there was no more land to be tilled, and no other livelihood at hand, migration set in (to Australia and South Africa, as well as North and South America)—reducing the differences between European and frontier societies, and bringing the legal abolition of slavery and serfdom. But, McNeill emphasizes, "legally sanctioned compulsory labor" persisted—in Australia and the Congo, in the transport of Indian and Chinese "coolies" to the fringes of British and American settlements (carrying "three times as many persons across the world's oceans as ever left Africa in Atlantic slave ships"). Once again: a monumental thesis, compactly and matter-of-factly put.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1983
ISBN: 0691046581
Page Count: 73
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1983
BOOK REVIEW
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
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