A knowledgeable and heartfelt but bloated, directionless, and histrionic case for conserving fisheries.
The decline of Florida’s fisheries becomes a microcosm of global environmental destruction in this manifesto.
Debut author Weinstock, a Key West psychiatrist, looks back on 60 years of sport fishing in the Keys (he reprints hundreds of photos of his magnificent catches) to document a marine tragedy. Among the developments he cites: dwindling stocks of scrawnier fish; once-plentiful species driven to the brink of extinction; once-pristine waters, from his backyard canal to verdant reefs and ocean stretches, fouled by pollution, development, noise, and muck. He fingers many culprits. Commercial overfishing, especially with gill nets, has “massacred” many species. Agricultural runoff in the Gulf of Mexico has fostered nasty bacterial growth. Jet skiers drive fish mad with their buzz-saw din. Shopping malls have paved over salt marshes that nurtured sea life. Worst of all are the giant cruise ships tearing up the ocean floor with the wash from their colossal propellers. There’s certainly enough material here—and vivid firsthand impressions—to support a serious study of marine environmental problems. But it often gets lost amid the author’s rambling jeremiad against everything else that’s threatening the planet, including a mine in Alaska, climate change, Tea Party Republicans, “the monster of unrestrained, uncaring, insensitive capitalism,” and, of course, President Donald Trump, whose election represented “a vote to kill organic life on our planet earth.” And there’s more. Weinstock’s showily structured treatise—the 420-page text has a preface, a prologue, a “prelude,” and a 100-page epilogue capped with an “addendum”—still manages to be chaotic, often feeling like the meandering record of whatever the author happened to be thinking about at any given moment. There are epic fishing stories interrupted by digressions within digressions. There are reveries about Key West beach beauties and their “tanned, smooth, shining buttocks.” There are many anecdotes about the author’s psychiatric patients. These include a man who had a semipublic homosexual encounter at a porn shop and then had his soul healed by communing with dolphins and a woman who tried to kill herself and her children because she felt her breasts were too small (and then had her soul healed by augmentation surgery). All manner of odd, indigestible stuff gets hauled up in the dragnet, set on deck, ruminated over at length, and sketchily linked to global crises. Weinstock’s evident passion for and immersion in the aquatic world sometimes yield nature writing that is absorbing and even poetic, giving readers tidal flats with “pellucid water like flawless alpine air, an endless mass of glistening clarity pouring over the sand,” or a barracuda “suspended motionless” before “darting out at warp speed…like a female lion pinning its prey.” Unfortunately, his penchant for grand statements and cosmic dudgeon too often lapses into verbose bombast. (“Oil as an industry is cold, calculating, profit-driven and scrupulously devoid of conscience, a ravenous, voracious beast topping any great carnivore that ever stalked the earth, leaving behind unimaginable carnage.”) Weinstock would have been better served by less thunder and more attention to translating his considerable understanding of marine issues into a focused analysis.
A knowledgeable and heartfelt but bloated, directionless, and histrionic case for conserving fisheries.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 443
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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