Delicious, closely observed place vignettes of southeastern Arizona, from naturalist Bowers (A Full Life in a Small Place and Other Essays from a Desert Garden, 1995). The Santa Catalinas, the Pinalenos, the Huachucas, the Santa Ritas, Baboquivari—these southwestern mountains are for Bowers ``the stuff of wary beauty and abiding love . . . a love that lies less in easy responses than in intimate acquaintance, doggedly pursued.'' After 20 years, she is still going about making the place her home, finding, synecdochically, a vastness in the details: in the petroglyphs of the Hohokam, artist-farmers, contemporaries of Chaucer; in an old snag, perforated like a Chinese checkerboard, an acorn in every hole, tucked there by a woodpecker (``The tree seemed to have a hundred brown eyeballs''); in a melancholy walk on Mt. Graham, home of an endangered squirrel threatened by a new observatory. She is unhappy with the human degradation of her dreamscape, angry at the roads cutting through the wild, jarringly like ``rough footsteps in the dark, a banging door, the sound of gunfire,'' but she does not beat the reader senseless with such things. Rather, like a good pilgrim, she dawdles, lets the landscape move through her, tunes her fine eye to the exigent art of seeing—``the cliffs stand on the rim like the fur on an angry cat's back.'' Her delineations of the land are sharp as crystal, and fragile and melancholy, too, as if the land might melt into air, ephemeral as a desert flower. The desert Southwest is blessed with superb place portraitists: Edward Abbey, Charles Bowden, Jack Dykinga, and many more. Add Bowers to that embarrassment of riches.
Pub Date: Aug. 15, 1997
ISBN: 0-8165-1717-7
Page Count: 175
Publisher: Univ. of Arizona
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1997
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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