An earnest, sometimes overwrought, and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to link the famed Lewis and Clark expedition to modern environmentalist thought. Botkin (Discordant Harmonies, 1990, etc.), a proponent of the data-heavy New Ecology, sets out to cover the same ground Meriwether Lewis and William Clark did in their 18041806 survey of the Missouri River, maintaining that their careful observations on the native species, landscapes, and human residents of that great stretch of country should serve as models for avoiding ``a glamorized utopian vision of nature.'' He covers the ground in a fashion, all right, but the framing device is contrived. Botkin writes with none of the luminousness of Lewis's journals (``Ocian in View!''), none of the sense of wonder at the vast new country the expedition saw. Instead, he offers sometimes sterile, sometimes contorted observations such as: ``Lewis and Clark, like modern rivermen, were confronted hour by hour, day by day, with the reality of a changing, unpredictable, and harsh nature. It is these rates of change and kinds of changes that must be our guide to finding solutions to environmental problems.'' Botkin's decision to cut his text into subheaded, scatterburst, short discussions yields an argument that flows as choppily as the lower Missouri. In that brisk seen-this-done-that approach, simple fact too often stands in the place of reasoned observation, and statements of the obvious are offered as profundities. Botkin does hit, now and again, on meaty matters, as when he observes that even as our cartographic techniques have grown ever more sophisticated, it is harder and harder to buy a US Geological Survey topographic map, and his longish discussion of salmon ecology is worthy of a book in itself. Botkin's forays, too, into the mismanagement of our national resources are well taken. But in the end there are too many asides here, and too little matter. (maps, not seen) (Book-of-the-Month Club selection)
Pub Date: May 3, 1995
ISBN: 0-399-14048-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
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 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
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