by Kai Erikson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 22, 2017
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
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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