Fascinating—a fine adjunct to the art and poetry of the New England stone wall. (Photographs)
A skillful geo-archaeological study of New England’s stone walls.
Relics of a vanished agricultural civilization, the stone walls, in Thorson’s estimation, have transcended artifact to become landforms—high praise from a geologist. He hopes to bring readers up to speed on the physical properties that gave rise to the walls, especially the primitive, tossed rather than laid, ones. Which means that he starts at the beginning: how the rocks came to be where they were. He sketches the geological background of rock formation and transportation, along with changes in the lay of the land, then shifts to sociological factors that accounted for starting farms in upland regions—away from the coast, in tidewater estuaries and river valleys whose soil was mostly free of stones—where the combined forces of deforestation and frost heaving allowed farmers to harvest bountiful crops of fieldstones at a time when a burgeoning sense of private property gave the walls a purpose other than enclosure. Thorson’s writing is lively as he discusses the evolution of fences from wood to stone; wall types; the function and structure of walls; the degree of care that went into their construction (most were shabby affairs, farmers more interested in clearing than fencing); and the economic and geological forces of entropy that resulted in the walls’ collapse. Many are being rebuilt into more formal, well-ordered structures, though for Thorson (Geology/Univ. of Connecticut) they will never have the aura of the abandoned wall running through the woods. He gives a nod to the mythos of walls, calling in support from Robert Frost, Thoreau, J.B. Jackson, and Noel Perrin, but he saves his greatest enthusiasm for the ergonomics of wall building (“In carrying a stone, the ideal position with respect to the vertebrae . . .”) or about computer models determining optimum field size for fieldstones.
Fascinating—a fine adjunct to the art and poetry of the New England stone wall. (Photographs)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-8027-1394-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
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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