An impressively thorough study of ivory’s fascination, the corruption it engenders and the ongoing debate over its...
The ancient, enduring allure of a substance linked forever to the destiny of its predominant provider, the wild elephant.
Walker (A Certain Curve of Horn: The Hundred-Year Quest for the Great Sable Antelope of Angola, 2002) takes a full-circle approach to the complex role ivory has played in human societies since prehistory. He enumerates glory and plunder, wealth and greed, all of it focused on the substance technically known as dentin, which comprises the fighting teeth, or tusks, of mammals ranging from narwhals, walruses, hippos and wild pigs to, of course, elephants. Ivory has been laboriously fashioned into personal décor for centuries by craftspeople on every continent. Its incorporation into items such as furniture, billiard balls and piano keys produced the demand, principally in the latter half of the 19th century, that led directly to the mass slaughter of elephants and the virtual enslavement of laborers required to carry tusks out of the bush. Revulsion at these practices, plus the development of modern composites as industrial substitutes, eventually resulted in a 1990 ban on ivory in international commerce, with the African nations harboring the majority of elephants agreeing to stop legal exports. No ivory can be brought into the United States except as a component of bona fide antique objects, and eBay recently barred the sale of ivory of any kind (the sanction takes effect in January 2009). One of Walker’s major contributions is his analysis of the effect of this humanitarian drift on the actual plight of elephants. The African scene, he observes, is totally chaotic: a few pristine game parks on the one hand, starving herds in drought-ravaged areas on the other. Black-market ivory poaching still poses a major threat; elephants and humans constantly contest for habitat. Meanwhile, ivory worth millions accumulates from natural die-off and is securely warehoused. Why not sell it and use the proceeds, the author suggests, to help today’s elephants?
An impressively thorough study of ivory’s fascination, the corruption it engenders and the ongoing debate over its ecological impact.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-87113-995-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2008
HISTORY | NATURE | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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