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RIVERS OF POWER

HOW A NATURAL FORCE RAISED KINGDOMS, DESTROYED CIVILIZATIONS, AND SHAPES OUR WORLD

A valuable, well-observed work of history and geography.

An exploration of the role of rivers in sustaining humankind.

Rivers, writes environmental scientist Smith, are in the eye of the beholder. Their value is often not evident to us except in the biggest of pictures, which is why the current generations of humans continue to dam them, fill them with pollutants and plastic bottles, and otherwise mistreat them. “Only by taking the long view is their deeply foundational importance to human civilization revealed,” writes the author. This book takes that long view while also pointing to a few encouraging trends (and some discouraging ones as well). On the positive side is the increasing tendency of city governments to undertake projects of riverfront renewal, making parks and refuges where docks and warehouses used to stand—a good thing given, as Smith points out, that sometime in 2008, the majority of the human population shifted, for the first time, from the countryside to the city. Still, notes the author, rivers remain underappreciated, shaping us in ways that are not always easy to discern. For example, they help form cultural and ethnic borders that in turn define nations, and they provide avenues of conquest, exploration, and migration: "Rivers, and physical geography more generally, contribute to the size and shapes of nations and thus the geospatial pattern of economic and military power around the world." When rivers play out, as in the case of ancient Uruk and the urban civilizations of the pre-European American Southwest, then cultures collapse, something to think about given the increasingly evident effects of worldwide climate change on the world’s rivers—some of which will dry up, others of which will flood as weather patterns change. Smith examines historical precedents along the Nile, Yangtze, and other rivers to project how these drivers of history, “supercharged fuel lines” of planetary energy, will affect the future.

A valuable, well-observed work of history and geography.

Pub Date: April 21, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-316-41200-1

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Little, Brown Spark

Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Awards & Accolades

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  • Readers Vote
  • 75


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  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2017


  • New York Times Bestseller


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  • National Book Award Finalist

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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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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