What Napa was, what it is, where it's going: Conaway weighs them in the balance, and shudders.
Visions and desires clash memorably in the bottle green valley of the Napa River.
The Napa Valley has a long agricultural history, from prunes to cattle, and, of course, winemaking, but the rise of the boutique operations has brought contention, with all their ostentatious cultural baggage and, in a number of cases, deleterious environmental impacts. Conaway (Napa, 1992, etc.) paints a grim picture of the changes afoot in the valley: the steroid houses, monuments to money and their absentee owners; the hunger for a vineyard of one's own—not that the owners would get their hands dirty, these would be vanity vineyards—for display purposes; the making of cult wines, the swells needing an imprimatur that associated them with the oldest expression of husbandry and cultural accomplishment, thinking its spiritual worth would rub off on them. Problem was that in the “lost decade of the nineties,” there wasn't any land down in the valley for sale, so the arrivistes had to buy the hillsides, where their plantings—homes and vines—resulted in erosion, the runoff fouling water supplies. Such changes signaled that a way of life was ending, the small town's sense of proportion and responsibility, and inevitably horns were locked over development. The majority of Conaway's work details the struggle between and among various local organizations to pass land-use laws, or simply to have existing laws enforced, and winemakers bent on maximizing profits, where another row of vines another step closer to the stream means many thousands of dollars. Conaway's sketches of the personalities involved—a bouillabaisse of wealthy honchos, countercultural trust-fund folk, local politicos, environmentalists, old winemakers and new—can be wicked, but he tries to present a relatively fair picture of their concerns and circumstances as they jockey for position in the evolving landscape of the valley.
What Napa was, what it is, where it's going: Conaway weighs them in the balance, and shudders.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2002
ISBN: 0-618-06739-6
Page Count: 378
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
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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