Modern research techniques enable debut authors Hunt (Anthropology/Univ. of Hawaii at Manoa) and Lipo (Archaeology/California State Univ., Long Beach) to review the “mysteries” of the Easter Islands and offer some solutions of their own.
Rapa Nui (aka the Easter Islands) have long been thought to illustrate how human environmental overreach led to collapse, as advanced monument builders undermined the ecology, beginning an inevitable slide. The authors make a counter-argument that “the problems were social, not a result of environmental ruin. History is the witness that Rapa Nui suffered near genocide, not self-inflicted ‘ecocide.’ ” They offer an alternative to Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyerdahl’s thesis that human settlers had arrived by 400 CE. Based on “all of the over 120 radiocarbon dates published for Rapa Nui,” Hunt and Lipo confirm that the arrival of human settlers, including monument builders, was later than previously thought, and the deforestation earlier. Modern research has established the likelihood that rats were responsible for the destruction of the native giant palm. The authors also muster the evidence to show, contrary to what Heyerdahl claimed, that “the portrayal of an island dominated by a strong central ruling authority, or torn asunder by warring tribes, is simply wrong.” The island’s population, including statue makers, probably functioned as small, peaceful, cooperative agrarian groups that settled successfully in an environment already denuded of trees. They developed food-production techniques which worked in an environment already denuded of trees. What did the islanders in was the stream of ship-borne Western visitors—and the diseases they brought—that began in the 18th century. A fascinating new chapter of the unwitting but tragic decimation of the native Rapa Nui populations, brought about unwittingly by cultural contact rather than the decline of their own society.
Pub Date: June 21, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-5031-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2011
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
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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