A detailed yet incomplete effort to connect history, economics, and the environment.
Ticer (The Alien Stranger, 2018, etc.) combines a primer on the recent science of climate change with an annotated account of world history and economics.
Summarizing vast swaths of historical and scientific research, Ticer attempts to provide not only a history leading up to the present climate developments, but to determine, as he says, “what is needed for the foreseeable future.” The book outlines various historical chapters while occasionally relating such histories (of the United States, capitalism, and so forth) to the ongoing climate crisis. The goal here is to understand “how a balanced system of free enterprise and government regulation can result in both economic prosperity and a more livable environment.” Despite that goal, readers may find less discussion of climate change than expected. Chapter three provides a truncated overview of the rise of civilization, examining ancient history from the Sumerians to the Akkadians and from Mesopotamia to Egypt. Another chapter describes the political economic history of Europe. The book’s subject turns increasingly economic with lengthy discussions of the gold standard, monetary policy, and inflation economics. By the end, Ticer provides an impressive synopsis of a large amount of historical information into a single text and offers a few broad suggestions along the way for governmental responses to climate change (“What is needed is more investment in climatology to determine future effects of weather to determine remedies for such possible catastrophes at severe times of cold and heat”). However, the limited analysis of climate change doesn’t cohere with the historical background. The other issue is the lack of citations, making it difficult to evaluate which of the book’s claims are original and which are mere summary.
A detailed yet incomplete effort to connect history, economics, and the environment.Pub Date: July 21, 2018
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 91
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
