An engaging, meticulously observed journey that brings other cultures alive.
A collection of tales about the author’s exotic travels and culinary adventures.
Studying endangered lemurs in Madagascar, sampling the world’s most expensive coffee in Indonesia and licking an ant’s butt in Australia—these are just some of the adventures King has enjoyed while traveling the world. Here, she puts these and other exotic experiences together in an engaging, breezy collection of essays, barely pausing for breath as her lively curiosity takes her to another adventure. “This is why I love to travel: It shakes me out of my routine, provides endless opportunities for experiencing the world anew, and gets right up in my face with tangible evidence that there are many ways to live one’s life,” she says. King isn’t interested in painting broad pictures of the places she visits; her essays are vignettes that, through the accumulation of closely observed details, provide a window into other cultures and ways of life. A bird sanctuary in Costa Rica is a “tropical madhouse” where “[r]oosters crow at midnight”; an Australian tree is known as “lawyer cane” because, “once hooked by the thorns on this pitiless plant, one is as irretrievably entangled as if involved in the legal process”; in a Kenyan village, cow pies cover the earth “like a three-dimensional carpet.” The author has a particular passion for food; her description of various meals in the Apulia region of Italy is enough to make hungry gourmets salivate. The “silky sauce” of a pasta dish was “intensely flavored with lobster and peppered with small pieces of the sweet seafood.” On a somewhat less hedonistic note, King’s travels also inspire her to ruminate on the challenges of environmental conservation—development in Madagascar is destroying the habitat of lemurs—and her own mortality. A tour of Paris, she says, “had shown me how to celebrate death, how to embrace it with reliquaries and taxidermy and catacombs.” As for those ants, she reports, “The taste was like mixing the intense fizz of an Alka-Seltzer with tangy lime sherbet.”
An engaging, meticulously observed journey that brings other cultures alive.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Destination Insights
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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