Though somewhat disjointed, a book with plenty of high points.
A robust inquiry into “seeking the bigger picture.”
The late philosopher Roland Barthes had a fear of heights and a hatred of mountains. Had he been around to read McPherson’s book, he might have reconsidered: Seeing from up high can yield awe, and while “awe often carries an undercurrent of fear,” it can provoke some, if you will, elevated thoughts. It can also yield awareness of what surveyors call “ground truth,” a point that McPherson, author of Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat, addresses with his account of John B. Bachelder. An artist who arrived at the Gettysburg battlefield two days after the fighting there had stopped, Bachelder drew an aerial-perspective map that was so detailed that, after publication in 1864, thousands of military officers on both sides scrutinized it; in the end, after collating their findings, “only a single regiment was moved.” From there McPherson moves on to explore the 19th-century “mania” for bird’s-eye-view maps made by artists who “had learned well the perspective drawing of Renaissance masters.” McPherson darts from subject to subject, from the workings of aerial intelligence in modern spycraft to the AI targeting systems being used to bombard Gaza and the proliferation of drones. The narrative is thus rather diffuse—he himself admits to “attempting to keep many topics in view”—and the writing can sometimes drift into the purply abstract (“What is the length of a feeling? Totality lasted minutes, or an eternity, or was nothing at all.”) And while there are better books and articles on perception from above, including Barry Lopez’s peerless essay “Flight” and William Langewiesche’s Inside the Sky, McPherson’s book has some fine moments, perhaps most memorably his slog up a Texas mountain to look at a clock that’s meant to tick away for the next 10,000 years, taking a long view indeed.
Though somewhat disjointed, a book with plenty of high points.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9781662602955
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Astra House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
