Have a nice day, says our Cassandra, for that may be all that remains. (38 b&w illustrations)
Professional prophet of doom McGuire (Geophysical Hazards/University College London; Raging Planet, not reviewed) surveys the natural hazards threatening Life As We Know It and concludes that a wide assortment of cataclysmic Big Ones are on the way.
Writing of the inevitability—though not necessarily the imminence—of some natural event that could drastically alter or even terminate human life on earth, the author deals with the fragility of earth (yes, it’s fragile), global warming (yes, it’s real), ice ages (yes, another will come), volcanoes (yes, they remain a threat), and extraterrestrial dangers (no, not UFOs; yes, asteroids and comets). This is not a good book to share with a depressed friend. On our restless planet there are 1,400 earthquakes per day, a volcanic eruption per week, 40 hurricanes per year. “The picture I have painted is certainly bleak,” quips McGuire, “but the reality may be even worse.” And so it is. Ice ages are periodic and, oddly, can be triggered by the kind of global warming now in progress. “Super-eruptions” of volcanoes do occur. If, for example, Yellowstone were to go off as it did 650,000 years ago, it would not damage just Yogi Bear; the preeminence of the US would end, states McGuire, and the global economy would nose-dive. On an even grimmer note, he reproduces a scary chart that shows the orbits of planet-bashing asteroids near the earth. There is, he says, a 100% chance that a big one will hit us again. (Remember that 10-kilometer rock that did in the dinosaurs 65 million years ago?) When it does, death will be instant for those it lands near or on, slow and miserable for the rest who survive to confront “cosmic winter” as sunlight is unable to penetrate the cloud of dust kicked up by the collision.
Have a nice day, says our Cassandra, for that may be all that remains. (38 b&w illustrations)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-19-280297-6
Page Count: 191
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2002
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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