A bold and convincing revision of Rapa Nui’s history.
An archeologist reexamines the mystery of Rapa Nui—and offers answers.
Pitts, a British archaeologist and author, begins his latest book with a bold appeal: It is time to question everything we have been told about Rapa Nui. For much of modern history, he tells us, this isolated island, located more than 2,000 miles west of Santiago, Chile, has been blamed for its own demise. Yet the familiar tales of war, cannibalism, and ecocide laced with judgment and condemnation have little grounding in historical truth. Instead, Pitts gives us a far more plausible account, in which slavery, kidnapping, and disease, driven by European conquest, are to blame. In Rapa Nui, the colonial playbook was catastrophically effective. It decimated the island nation in all but 15 years, during which its population plunged from 5,000 to little more than 100, with just 26 women. In a wise decision, Pitts plainly lays out the facts yet doesn’t dwell unnecessarily on tragedy. He instead asks us to reframe our line of inquiry from how things went wrong—after all, we now have answers—to how did the Rapa Nui flourish for so long? Their island is, according to Pitts, a place of fragile soil, restricted marine life, and no permanent freshwater streams. The answer lies in bravura skill in farming and land management. “Rapa Nui,” he says, “is the world’s greatest example of a people given lemons, and making lemonade.” Some of these insights come thanks to the pioneering work of British archeologist Katherine Routledge. Pitts gives readers an affectionate profile of her; she carried out extraordinary fieldwork and reporting during an expedition to the island in 1914, only to have her work questioned, and then overridden by the London establishment. Throughout his book, Pitts capably and passionately argues his case, though he occasionally veers into the perils of academic writing. The result is a welcome contribution to Pacific Island history that holds relevance not just for Rapa Nui, but for other islands across this vast ocean.
A bold and convincing revision of Rapa Nui’s history.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2026
ISBN: 9780063344679
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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