Almost without doubt, the sable will become a pawn in the politics of wildlife conservation, but Walker’s study will, at a...
From journalist Walker, a story of the sable antelope and the varying efforts to protect it in war-weary Angola, as well as an intelligent explanation of that country’s tribulations over the past decades.
The great sable was the last of the large quadrupeds of Africa to come to European attention: not only is it a wary animal, but its human neighbors—the Songo and Lwimbe—held it in esteem and kept it a secret. Once known, it became a prized object for every natural-history expedition and, unfortunately, every big-game hunt (often one and the same thing in the early 20th century). Walker, choosing his words carefully, follows the intrigues of those drawn to the creature in hopes of atavistic, scientific, economic, or political glory. That the antelope lives only in the Angola heartland demands that Walker pay heed to the colonial and civil unrest that has pounded the country since the 1960s, for those wars necessarily have a direct impact on the great sable—the animal is, after all, edible and in a starving nation—and also keep conservationists from getting to the area. But profound effects have also come from other forces and circumstances, such as reserves that are opened to big-spending hunters or to those with the right political connections. Warring camps of conservationists can range, on the one hand, from big-game hunters willing to finance new reserves in exchange for a chance to shoot one of the bulls to those, on the other, who believe the animal can survive only in its unique habitat. Both are given voice by Walker, who makes it clear there’s as much ego as conservation ethic at work in deciding the fate of the great sable.
Almost without doubt, the sable will become a pawn in the politics of wildlife conservation, but Walker’s study will, at a minimum, bring greater awareness of its plight.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-87113-858-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
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 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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