A useful, illuminating analysis bolstered by a lifetime of close observation.
A man who has devoted his life to studying society delivers a final report on everything he has learned.
At 86, Erikson (Emeritus, Sociology and American Studies/Yale Univ.; A New Species of Trouble: Explorations in Disaster, Trauma, and Community, 1994, etc.) has been examining the social order, or lack thereof, for a very long time, specializing in the effect of catastrophe on community. In this valedictory volume, he delivers a personal history of sociology, amplified by a lifetime of fieldwork among people undergoing everything from a disastrous flood in West Virginia to the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska to the war in Yugoslavia. The author starts out strongly, with a cogent account of how early societies formed and were then altered by psychological and social upheaval. The book follows a narrative line redolent of the American historian Henry Adams, as the world goes further away from unity—under the unquestioned dominance of church and state—to one of multiplicity, where the rules and traditions become destabilized. Erikson presents a modern world that is increasingly fractured due to nationalism, racism, wealth inequality, and what he calls “speciation,” where people define their political or racial enemies as subhuman. Here, the Croatian War becomes an especially tragic history lesson on how communities and even families can be divided into warring tribes of “us” versus “them.” “When those frameworks are stripped away,” writes the author, “when all those politically imposed border lines are erased, the true map of humankind—the natural geography of the world—will emerge.” Ultimately, Erikson bites off more than he can chew; he seeks to cover every possible subject, and the narrative occasionally bogs down in droning prose on geographic spaces and migratory patterns. On the whole, though, the author proves to be a wise guide to a broad field of study.
A useful, illuminating analysis bolstered by a lifetime of close observation.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-300-10667-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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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