A natty tour of the society’s house: closets, skeletons, and all.
The former executive editor of its magazine provides a candid history of the National Geographic Society’s vision and politics.
In 1888, wealthy Washington lawyer Gardiner Greene Hubbard gathered together a group of men and suggested forming a society to advance popular geographical knowledge through lectures and a magazine. He sowed the seeds of the National Geographic Society, but its crucial bearings were set after Hubbard’s death, when son-in-law Alexander Graham Bell reluctantly assumed the society’s presidency, extended the organization beyond the clubby confines of Washington, and pushed the magazine to the forefront of operations, championing pictorial content as a vital element of popular appeal. In this gratifyingly evenhanded chronicle of the society’s personalities and initiatives, Poole fairly and thoroughly profiles its leading figures, their strengths and many weaknesses, the positive and negative role played by nepotism. (Bell’s son-in-law, Gilbert H. Grosvenor, and grandson Melville Grosvenor ran the magazine and the society through the late 1960s.) The author also details the society’s sponsorship of such figures as Jane Goodall and the Leakeys, and the evolution of the magazine. Changes did not come quickly to the institution, least of all to the editorial content of the magazine; Poole frankly refers to lackluster prose and drifts into racism and anti-Semitism (which were institutional problems as well) that led in 1937 to a pro-Nazi article, “the biggest embarrassment in the history of the National Geographic Society.” Life at National Geographic got hopping in the 1980s, with a whole new group of editors and writers, among them Poole; although he writes with sureness of the organization’s past, it is in covering the past 20 years, with all the clashing of wills, that Poole guides readers with special acumen through the mazelike backroom politics.
A natty tour of the society’s house: closets, skeletons, and all.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-59420-032-7
Page Count: 349
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
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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