A snappy scholarly work that captures a momentous shift in American environmental thinking, made exciting by the fire of...
Rome (History/Penn State Univ.) offers a piquant interpretation of the links between the mass migration to suburbia and the rise of the environmental movement.
Working like a bloodhound, the author follows the trail of the environmental costs of tract housing, explaining how they became translated into environmental issues and then became part of the public agenda. Writing with real momentum (and a whiff of the lecture hall), Rome details how the booming postwar mass-consumption economy became an environmental disaster area. He argues clearly and persuasively that, as suburban developments started falling apart like old jalopies, environmental movements took shape bit by bit. Building in sensitive areas (such as floodplains or wetlands) produced flooding, wholesale land-clearing produced erosion, and septic problems spurred even the government to act. Each degradation found expression in a citizen’s group and, as open space disappeared right before our eyes, a wilderness and outdoors movement took shape. The machine in the garden, from oil spills to Silent Spring, prompted an environmentalism with aesthetic and social concerns. Rome also demonstrates how a taste for cleanliness, comfort, and convenience has slowed progress, and how the Wise Use movement gets fuel from environmental regulations that puncture the dream of home and land ownership (a notion built into the nation’s economic and political structure following the Depression’s class bitterness). Though Rome thumps his chest over what he considers his original ideas concerning the narrow self-interests of homeowners, the sharing of some environmentalist and conservationist goals, and the environmentally conscious behavior of a few government agencies, these are pretty well-established opinions. The final indignity of it all, Rome sadly relates, is that suburbia continues its unabated growth today, with all the old players in the suburban-industrial complex still in command, and still wrecking the landscape.
A snappy scholarly work that captures a momentous shift in American environmental thinking, made exciting by the fire of Rome’s passionate critique of suburbia.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-521-80490-6
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Cambridge Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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