A sobering look at how cultures die.
Big, bad changes in human history.
Award-winning science journalist Wade opens by defining “apocalypse” as “a rapid, collective loss that fundamentally changes a society’s way of life” and then proceeds to examine world events from the last 50,000 years. Most don’t meet her definition, but few readers will complain. The Neanderthal extinction of 40,000 years ago probably passed with few fireworks. It’s also a matter of pure speculation. Wade’s summary of the latest findings emphasizes a mostly nonviolent ebbing of scattered bands of long-established Europeans in the face of more numerous immigrants from the east. Aside from the occasional volcanic eruption or invasion, Wade’s apocalypses are slow, often taking centuries, fascinating to archeologists and historians if not Hollywood producers. Humans often quarrel, compete, and make war, but no day passes when they don’t yearn to eat, so bad weather and famine play an outsized role. Forty-two hundred years ago, rainfall diminished around the world. Egypt’s Old Kingdom collapsed as Nile floods became a trickle. This is well documented, but archeologists are still unearthing huge cities across India, their writing still undeciphered, abandoned during this time. Pacific Ocean temperature changes produce El Niño weather, which annoys Americans but devastates Peru and may have done worse in the past. The author concludes with two apocalypses that gave birth to today’s world: Europe’s incursion into the Americas, which killed tens of millions of people, and African slavery, which took the lives of millions more. Looking to the future, Wade writes, “It’s time to get used to living in, and with, the apocalypse….Unlike most of the apocalypses in this book, ours are and will be truly global. In the case of climate change, it might eventually transform our planet into a place unlike any human has ever seen before.”
A sobering look at how cultures die.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780063097308
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
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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