A wealth of information, frustratingly jumbled.
Mishmash of American history, ecological survey, and travel guide surveys the state of Lewis and Clark’s route as it exists today.
Naturalist Botkin traveled this road previously in Our Natural History (1995), which traced Lewis and Clark’s journey along the Missouri River. Here, he follows their trail with an eye to the changes that have occurred in the 200 years since the explorers blazed their way west. He makes some direct comparisons when focusing on the unique features of the environment that the two men catalogued—the Cahokia Mounds near St. Louis, the Loess Hills outside of Omaha, the lost midwestern prairies, the shape of the Missouri river, the Great Falls in Montana—but Botkin will not be constrained by his own literary device. His text roams far and wide, covering the geological forces that formed the landscape, the native flora and fauna and how it fares today, the climatic changes that are characteristic of different areas. The author extensively contemplates the behavior of rivers over time, considering various dams, power schemes, fishing efforts, bird habitats, conservation efforts, and floods. He compares historical attitudes toward wildlife with contemporary ones and (although it is not the main thrust of the work) puts forth his own philosophy of coexistence with the wild, a strategy that’s equal parts conservation and intelligent development. Botkin also gives practical advice on how to see the sites he discusses: “State Route 50 crosses the Platte River at Louisville, Nebraska (reached from Lincoln by car via Interstate 80 to State Route 370).” All in all, there’s unfortunately little of Lewis and Clark, since they provide the emotional thrust to the subject. Botkin may feel passionately about the land he discusses, but there’s scant evidence of it in his choppy, flat, and oddly repetitive prose.
A wealth of information, frustratingly jumbled.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-19-516243-9
Page Count: 266
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
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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