A thoughtfully elegant, reflective work.
A Houston native explores the city’s relationship to the storms that have posed a perennial threat to its existence.
In 2017, Fields, who works as a fly-fishing guide on the Missouri River, drove from Iowa to Houston. Though ambivalent about returning, the destruction wrought by Hurricane Harvey had “unlocked a spell of sudden and lucid conviction” that compelled him home. That journey became the basis of this book, about the people, such as land speculator Augustus Allen, and historical forces—like early-19th-century American expansionism—that created Houston from a “sucking bowl” of swampland. Accompanying Fields on his travels was a friend and fellow former Marine named Nigel. Together, they toured post-Harvey devastation by boat, observing how destroyed neighborhoods “seethed, in the humid, post-storm heat, like giant and filthy altars to loss.” As the narrative develops, the “deep water[s]” against which Houston had always fought become a metaphor for personal pain and suffering. Fields reveals that Harvey provided “the neutralizing circumstance of real emergency” that allowed him and the “fierce and restless” bipolar mother from whom he had grown distant to “see each other freshly, without baggage.” At the same time, obligations created by the hurricane helped the author revive closeness with Nigel, who had tested him with years of maddening inconsistency. A year later, Fields returned alone to observe the lingering aftereffects of Harvey on the oil industry that had enriched Houston but also created refineries susceptible to toxic emissions, especially in the wake of massive storms. During such storms, writes the author, “most refineries and processing facilities shut down their monitoring systems, turning a blind eye to malfunctions.” In this brief yet memorable book, Fields creates an unsentimental yet poignant story that examines the complexities of one man's homecoming. With eloquence and grace, the author investigates the interconnectedness of place, history, and identity.
A thoughtfully elegant, reflective work.Pub Date: June 20, 2023
ISBN: 9781324003793
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
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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