A remarkable and beautifully written book in which the rich stuff of family and local history join together to entertain, to...
Like the legendary stories his Newfoundland relatives told—stories that flowed back and forth, picking up after interruptions—Macfarlane offers a book in which personal memoir, history, and reflection on war all come together in one memorable, luminous whole.
Growing up in Canada, Macfarlane was soon aware of the great difference between his father's relations, who maintained silence ``with the same hospitable agility a graceful conversationalist uses to overcome it,'' and his mother's family from Newfoundland, who loved to talk ``in great looping circles.'' And it is these stories of the Goodyear family of Newfoundland, which Macfarlane recalls as he relates a family history, that are in many ways a history of Newfoundland itself. Until voting to join Canada in 1948, Newfoundland was Britain's oldest colony, and this decision, which the author's grandfather could never forgive, led to one of the great family stories, for the old man apparently once told the now-Queen, in Newfoundland on a visit, exactly what he thought. An integral part of Newfoundland, the Goodyears immigrated from the western coast of England in the early 18th century, living first in an isolated fishing village, then moving in 1908 to Grand Falls in the interior. Here, in this company town established to provide paper for one of Britain's great press-barons, they prospered, but, like so many loyal Newfoundlanders, the Goodyears were irrevocably affected by WW I. Two thirds of the Newfoundlanders who volunteered were either killed or wounded; the Goodyear family sent five sons, and only two returned. It is this war that resonates through Macfarland's story: the way in which the family and the island responded, and were then subsequently changed, describes a place and a people of fierce independence, courage and loyalty, who would never be quite the same again.
A remarkable and beautifully written book in which the rich stuff of family and local history join together to entertain, to instruct, and to move deeply.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-671-74705-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1991
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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