A fascinating treatment of both environmentalism and the structure of activism at the time.
The story of how April 22, 1970, began the tradition of Earth Day and helped to create the modern environmental movement.
On that date, Rome (Environmental History and Environmental Nonfiction/Univ. of Delaware; The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism, 2001) writes, a national teach-in took place, involving more than 12,000 events and many thousands of people from all walks of life. The prime mover was Democratic Sen. Gaylord Nelson, who issued the call for the event in November 1969, established a bare-bones national coordinating operation and secured funding. However, he refused to set any all-encompassing agenda or single national objective, leaving the direction of events and form of activities in the hands of local organizers. They succeeded beyond all expectations. The author has interviewed more than 120 participants, employing materials cross-checked through meticulous archive work. Rome discusses the relation between the Earth Day teach-in and the anti-war movement, as well as the women's movement. In those days, nuclear fallout from atmospheric testing was one of the main drivers of campaigns to clean up water supplies, ensure the safety and wholesomeness of milk, and protect children. The author details the political coalition that backed Nelson and its relation with Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. He profiles selected events and speakers, the press corps relations to events, and the interaction with the Nixon administration, which later passed groundbreaking legislation. Activities on campuses were the major focus, and student organizing was the primary, but not exclusive, energizer.
A fascinating treatment of both environmentalism and the structure of activism at the time.Pub Date: April 16, 2013
ISBN: 978-0809040506
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2013
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 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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