An informative and entertaining narrative of the complexities of a massive industry, in which the author lays bare...
Historian Ogle (Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer, 2006, etc.) explores the historical foundations and inaccuracies surrounding the story of the industry that supplies the beef, chicken and pork to America’s carnivorous multitudes.
The author does a solid job laying out the early steps involved in the building of America’s meat industry: the early beginnings of farmers successfully farming cattle, corn and hogs in northeastern Virginia; the reign of the big meat packers; the contentious relationship between President Theodore Roosevelt and activist Upton Sinclair; the rise of chain grocery stores in the 1920s and the issues of packaging, distributing and producing a uniform product. Ogle chronicles the stories of the early pioneers in the meat business, including the “dressed beef men” such as Philip Armour, Gus Swift and others, who “designed slaughterhouses that emulated factories and incorporated those into complex, nationwide distribution systems,” and Jesse Jewell, who in three decades, beginning in the mid-1930s, built an empire worth millions in the chicken business. Ogle’s accessible recounting of the early days of the meat industry provides the solid framework for her wide-ranging exploration of the industry during the second half of the 20th century. She delves into the legislation, various reform movements and consolidation of the meatpacking industry in the 1960s and ’70s. She also looks at the contemporary struggles of alternative meat producers and nonfactory farmers—e.g., Mel Coleman and his Natural Beef, and Bill Niman and Orville Schell, who began a cattle ranch in Northern California in the 1970s, supplying natural beef to local restaurants.
An informative and entertaining narrative of the complexities of a massive industry, in which the author lays bare Americans’ sense of entitlement and insistence on cheap and abundant meat and questions what that voracious appetite has wrought on our bodies and the environment.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-15-101340-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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 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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