Being fully aware of the happy ending brings no diminishment of anxiety as the reader watches the insect march inexorably...
Gripping account of a 19th-century plague that nearly wiped out the world’s wine production.
It’s a tale straight out of Hollywood, a 1950s horror film complete with a stealthy yet hideous alien invader and a stubbornly ignorant public. From these elements, British journalist Campbell (Fenian Fire: The British Government Plot to Assassinate Queen Victoria, 2004, etc.) spins a vinous tale to make the blood run cold. About 150 years ago, a microscopic marauder hitched a ride on a botanic cutting and landed in southern France, where it promptly began to make a meal out of the plentiful grape vines. The villain was the Phylloxera vastatrix, a tiny yellow aphid that feasted on the centuries-old plants; unlike the hardy roots in the insect’s native US, France’s vines had no resistance to the bright little parasite. Phylloxera was thus able to make its merry way from vineyard to vineyard, root to root, until it had dined on all the plants of France, devastation in its wake. Campbell follows the insect and the mighty men who bent their energies to discover the source of their ruin. The scientists who struggled to understand Phylloxera’s genesis and habits, the northern bourgeois vintners who smugly blamed the devastation on southern overproduction and soil exhaustion (until their own vineyards were also decimated), and the unlikely salvation from the very source of the plague—the author makes it all into an elegant little thriller. His prose is a delight, elegantly economical and always clear, whether he’s discussing the curiously complex life cycle of the hungry aphid, cataloguing the crackpot theories that arose to combat it, or bringing to life the professional rivalries that threatened to allow all of Europe to succumb to Phylloxera before a remedy was finally discovered.
Being fully aware of the happy ending brings no diminishment of anxiety as the reader watches the insect march inexorably across the globe in this unlikely, thoroughly enjoyable cliffhanger.Pub Date: March 25, 2005
ISBN: 1-56512-460-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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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