Careful account of environmental controversy, a companion to Robert W. Righter’s recent Battle Over Hetch Hetchy.
A tale of two valleys—and two quite different visions of what to do with them.
The Yosemite Valley, in the Sierra Nevada of California, “once had a sister—the Hetch Hetchy Valley—just twenty-five miles to the north,” writes Simpson (Landscape Architecture/Ohio State Univ.; Visions of Paradise, 1999). The past tense is important to note, for in the 1920s, following half a century of argument and exploration, the Tuolumne River in Hetch Hetchy was dammed to provide water and power for San Francisco, 170 miles distant. The two major camps were personified by conservationist John Muir and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted on one hand and forestry expert Gifford Pinchot on the other; Muir and Olmsted pressed for protection of the entire Tuolumne watershed, whereas Pinchot held that the damage caused “by substituting a lake for the present swampy floor of the [Hetch Hetchy] valley . . . is altogether unimportant compared with the benefits to be derived from its use as a reservoir.” The political ascendancy of the railroading, ranching and development interests helped seal Hetch Hetchy’s fate, as did Pinchot’s own rise to head the U.S. Forest Service. The debate, Simpson observes, helped solidify stereotypes that persist today, including the characterization of conservationism as the brainchild of “the liberal, intellectual, and wealthy elite of the East Coast”; it also taught the conservationists to avoid grappling with local interests by taking environmental questions to a national audience, which would later serve Muir’s Sierra Club very well. Simpson does a good job of charting the complex political maneuvering that accompanied both the creation of Yosemite National Park and the damming of the Hetch Hetchy Valley, a matter that eventually came before the national legislature. He closes by endorsing a plan to remove the dam and restore the valley to its former state, asking, pointedly, “Would Congress listen to public opinion this time, or would economic interests and politics again dictate the outcome?”
Careful account of environmental controversy, a companion to Robert W. Righter’s recent Battle Over Hetch Hetchy.Pub Date: July 12, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-42231-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
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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