A well-crafted history of civilization seen through the prism of one of the most profitable agricultural products in human...
A sweeping, panoramic history of opium and its deep roots in a vast array of societies and cultures.
Inglis (Crow Mountain, 2016, etc.) opens with an observation from Thomas Jefferson, who noted, “merchants know no country,” and ends with her own trenchant observation that the war on opium is endless. In between is a story that stretches across 5,000 years of history and touches nearly every part of human civilization. The author begins in the Fertile Crescent and then traces the cultivation of opium through the Bronze Age, the Greek and Roman civilizations (“Homeric references to the opium poppy are concerned with the need for emotional oblivion, but Greek scholars were also discovering its many medicinal properties”), the Renaissance, the disastrous Opium Wars, and the creation of Hong Kong. Inglis’ history is not only wide, but deep due to her keen analysis of how entrenched opium is in modern culture in everything, from medicine to war to addiction to commerce. In the second half of the book, the author covers the isolation of morphine from opium and how new discoveries transformed the West. The third part of the book brings us quickly to today, focusing on the ready availability of professionally produced heroin, the explosion of big pharma, and the markets that have created “Generation Oxy.” If there’s one message to take from this history, it’s that prohibition doesn’t work. As Inglis notes, whether it’s crimes committed by gangsters or strategies rolled out by massive pharmaceutical companies, this gift from the natural world to ease pain and suffering has become a commodity. She ends where she began: “Within all of these parameters, economies are built, both legal and illegal, petty and international. And whether they be sidewalk dope dealers or pharmaceutical giants, merchants know no country, just as the search for even a glimpse of paradise is constant and without end.”
A well-crafted history of civilization seen through the prism of one of the most profitable agricultural products in human history.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64313-055-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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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