Amiable pop history.
From the editor of several popular collections of letters (Behind the Lines, 2005, etc.), a down-home account of his travels in search of neglected historical sites.
There’s no particular rhyme or reason to the places Carroll chose to visit, which range from the tiny Hawaiian island where a Japanese pilot crash-landed after bombing Pearl Harbor to Daniel Boone’s grave, which may not actually hold his remains and which gives rise to a long discourse on other famous people who were buried, dug up and buried again elsewhere. This grab-bag approach suits Carroll, whose appreciation of history is sincere but shallow. At one point, in a Cleveland bar that stands on the site of a movie theater whose showing of a risqué French film led to the Supreme Court’s landmark 1964 ruling on obscenity, the author got into a conversation with a patron “about how boring we thought [history] was growing up.” Now that he loves history, the author’s strategy for converting others is to make it as unintimidating as possible: He offers chatty descriptions of his journeys and of his guides to the various sites, who were often just amateur historians like Carroll, and he makes eloquent pleas for the importance of such forgotten episodes as the Wyoming race riot that killed dozens of Chinese coal miners in 1885. Still, it’s odd that he spends so much time at places where no physical traces remain of the incidents he wishes to commemorate. “The stories, not the physical sites, are what’s paramount,” he avers, a claim that would be more convincing if it weren’t immediately followed by, “and they become more indelibly impressed in our minds when we travel to where they occurred.” Since Carroll is a good storyteller and has done an impressive amount of research, his lack of rigor and aw-shucks manner will grate only on readers who prefer a more systematic approach to history.
Amiable pop history.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-307-46397-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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