An urgent argument for the good that government can do to combat climate change.
Hope and a warning.
Because of a geological fluke, bad air and brown skies settled over the Los Angeles basin even before the rise of the automobile. But over the last century, as oil refineries and international shipping docks started dotting the coast and as millions moved into newly created suburbs too spread out to be reached easily by public transit, Los Angeles became notorious for its smog. The cover was so thick that some newcomers to the area, including author Carlson’s mother, were unaware that the city was surrounded by mountains—until, by chance, extreme winds blew the filthy clouds away. “This is a book meant to celebrate and explain government’s great achievement in cleaning up my city’s air,” writes Carlson, an environmental law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a former acting administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. “But it is also a cautionary tale about corporate malfeasance and the massive harm it can do to public health and the environment.” Carlson presents a quick, efficient history of the factors that came together to tackle the scourge, factors that included concerned citizens both well-placed (like Dorothy Chandler of the Los Angeles Times dynasty) and downtrodden (including pioneering environmental justice groups from East Los Angeles and South Central Los Angeles); innovative scientists from regional institutions like UCLA and the California Institute of Technology; and local, state, and federal government combining to regulate oil and auto manufacturing companies that not only denied their role in creating the mess but spent billions to discourage action on it.
An urgent argument for the good that government can do to combat climate change.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780520387393
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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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