A slim book that takes readers on a mind-expanding journey.
A delightful, enlightening book that employs islands as jumping-off points for essays on a wide range of topics from A(nthropology) to Z(oology).
Chamberlin (Emeritus, English and Comparative Literature/Univ. of Toronto; A Covenant in Wonder with the World, 2012, etc.) introduces each of his island narratives with a bit of history: an entry from the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia of 1830, followed by an excerpt from some early observer’s commentary. Then, there’s no telling where he may take us. The principal islands featured here are Jamaica, Tahiti, Iceland, the Galápagos and Newfoundland, but there are dozens of others, near and far, small and large, real and imaginary. His chapter on Jamaica expands from landscape and people into culture, myths, language, why settlers came there and the larger question of why populations migrate. From Tahiti, Chamberlin launches into the remarkable prowess of Polynesian sailors, the hazards of ocean navigating and the reactions of early European explorers. Iceland leads to a discussion of volcanoes, the appearance and disappearance of islands, and the shifting of tectonic plates. Not surprisingly, the Galápagos chapter introduces the unique flora and fauna that shaped Darwin’s thinking about the origin of species, and bleak, glacier-shaped Newfoundland offers a tale of a place whose once-rich fisheries have disappeared and where people are now asking themselves whether it is time to depart their desolate land. Some passages demand to be read aloud: lists of the names of plants and birds found in the Caribbean and a traditional Polynesian chant from Raiatea, near Tahiti, that directed early sailors on how to navigate their way across the Pacific. Islands in plays, novels and movies, islands in legend and history, and even planet Earth, that island we all inhabit, all are objects of wonder and speculation for Chamberlin, who asks us to think about what they mean to us and what they tell us about our world and about ourselves, our history and our future.
A slim book that takes readers on a mind-expanding journey.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1933346564
Page Count: 256
Publisher: BlueBridge
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
