A definitive history of bird conservation in America.
America’s avian history.
McCommons, an environmental and travel journalist, writes, “When looking at the century-long fight to save America’s birds, it’s important to remember the victories.” While the book is full of birds being driven to extinction, skinned and feathered, and “blown to bits,” it’s really the story of the United States’ slow victory in keeping its diverse array of birds alive. The book opens with the story of early “shotgun ornithologists”: Without adequate binoculars in the 19th century, the only way to study birds was to shoot them down and examine their corpses. From the difference between Native American hunting bows and Jamestown settlers’ clumsy muskets to the contemporary threat of reflective high-rise windows, the book can be read as a history of the U.S. through birds, as, oddly enough, one can’t fully be told without the other. For example, readers may be surprised to learn that a landmark Supreme Court decision about “whether federal law supersedes state law” was originally brought to court over how to enforce the Migratory Bird Act. The author’s historiography is also current—he doesn’t shy away from the fact that James Audubon financed his successes by selling enslaved people, and he focuses on the impact of lesser-known female ornithologists such as Florence Merriam. His prose shines, as when recounting massive flocks of passenger pigeons darkening the sky for hours in the 1850s and ’60s: “Pigeons…spooked horses, impelled children to run for home, and caused the pious to drop to their knees in prayer. The throb and rush of air from beating wings went on all day while excrement fell like a snow, frosting the streets and buildings.” If the book stutters, it’s because it may be too comprehensive—readers may feel bogged down when McCommons zeroes in on not just bird hunters, but the middlemen who sold birds, or when he repeatedly returns to the subject of feather hats.
A definitive history of bird conservation in America.Pub Date: March 17, 2026
ISBN: 9781250286895
Page Count: 416
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
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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