Road warriors and transportation buffs will be pleased with this well-illustrated, well-written volume.
An engaging, appropriately sprawling history of the Texas Highway Department over its first century.
It’s entirely fitting that an agency of Texas government should have been mired in controversy at the outset. As Texas novelist and historian Dawson (House of Plenty: The Rise, Fall, and Revival of Luby’s Cafeterias, 2006, etc.) and former Texas Department of Transportation official Polson observe, for the first 15 years, officeholders struggled to control “the largest, wealthiest department or agency ever devised for any state in the United States.” It’s surprising, perhaps, that the narrative should take so straightforward a view of the shadier aspects of the department’s past, in which a couple of governors helped themselves to highway funds, a couple of others used roads as political favors, and the national government had to flex plenty of muscle to direct federal funds toward road-building within the state. Indeed, as the authors write, as far back as the early 1920s, owing to the odd way funds were distributed across the counties, “the federal government actually pronounced Texas ineligible to participate in a federal project to begin determining the location, design, and construction of interstate highways.” For all its birth in corruption, though, the department emerges in this account as competent and capable of herculean tasks, such as building the great span over the Pecos Gorge and funneling traffic safely through the gnarled metropolises of Houston and Dallas. Furthermore, the interstate actually did get built, despite the reluctance of Texans to float bonds in favor of a pay-as-you-go system: the first miles laid outside Corsicana in 1956, the last a stretch of highway between Amarillo and Lubbock completed nearly four decades later. Texas was among the last of the states to finish up the job, but then, “the other states’ task seldom compared with a fraction of what Texas had to accomplish.”
Road warriors and transportation buffs will be pleased with this well-illustrated, well-written volume.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62349-456-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Texas A&M Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2016
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
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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