The New World may well be another Old World, and hoary parables may speak as loudly as DNA testing in the search to answer...
Where did North Americans come from way back when, asks Canadian journalist Dewar (Cloak of Green, not reviewed, etc.), in this eye-opening study for laypeople that debates the merits of archaeological theories swirling about the question.
Archaeological orthodoxy has it that the ancestors of Native Americans entered the continent over the Bering Land Bridge at the end of the last Ice Age, some 10,000 years ago. But, as Dewar illustrates in this smoothly written overview of the conflicting evidence, there is plenty of material that suggests otherwise. There are the Caucasoid features of 8000+-year-old Kennewick Man; the mitochondrial DNA work that found examples of North American populations without a common ancestor in Asia; hookworm evidence in early South Americans that could not have survived a Beringian crossing; and ancient bones with African features, plus lots more niggling little questions that simply have no truck with the established picture. Dewar travels to all the locales, interviews all the principals, comes at the problem from many angles: remains, ancient art, oral traditions, forensic archaeology, international law, racism. This is all fascinating stuff, and Dewar writes it up with the flair of a good mystery—yet what rankles and haunts the reader long after the all the new theories have been posited are Dewar's condemnations of the field of archaeological study: all the petty squabbles and beard-pulling; the narrow-minded, fractious, timid, possessive scientists who don't even publish their findings; of government interference and the deference to vested interests; of the withheld reports and outright theft of evidence and private digs and scattered materials that amount to a scandal; and of the miserable politics—land, political, and academic—that taints everything it touches.
The New World may well be another Old World, and hoary parables may speak as loudly as DNA testing in the search to answer Dewar's question.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7867-0979-0
Page Count: 640
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
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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