Gauzy, reverie-like prose belies the writer’s intense awareness—historical, environmental, and psychological—of her...
Her family’s small farm in eastern Massachusetts, a rarity these days, prompts Brox (Five Thousand Days Like This One, 1999, etc.) to reflect on the ways of the land—old, new, and in transition.
For three generations, 100 acres of field, forest, and orchard on worn coastal hills north of Boston have supplied the extended Brox family with a farming life. Its history goes back much farther, and the author traces the agricultural practices of the area from the eastern Massachusetts tribes, who prized the light soils of the coast and river valleys, to the early colonialists, who prized the same turf in a more permanent, enclosed fashion that struck sparks. The farm itself is a flashpoint: “Whatever the situation of the land, there is always the lay of the family as well, its tugs and tensions, and how that falls out has as much to do with the success of farming as anything else.” With not enough tillable land, and with what soil there was getting used up, families sundered “when New England girls followed the roads down from rocky, marginal Vermont and New Hampshire farms to meet industry in the first textile cities.” Similarly, though centered on the farm, Brox’s text spins out from there to the tall grass country and islands off the coast. On a larkish trip west in January one year, she sets eyes on the land where failed New England farmers next set up shop: the prairie, with its false indigo and big bluestem, its Jeffersonian grid, its sweep and swale—she practically levitates in the beauty of the landscape. She loses herself in the granite quarries that built the foundations of the textile cities and explores the freethinking, communal experiment of early Nantucket. Always attuned to the human uses of the earth, Brox finds memory, identity, and heart in the orchard on her farm.
Gauzy, reverie-like prose belies the writer’s intense awareness—historical, environmental, and psychological—of her surrounds.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-86547-649-7
Page Count: 200
Publisher: North Point/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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