In the main, Blakeslee’s well-rendered story will be familiar to anyone who has followed the Yellowstone wolves, but those...
On-the-ground reporting on the fate of Canis lupus as a creature once nearly extirpated struggles to regain a home in the Rockies.
Think life is tough for American humans? Try living as a wolf, even with the putative protection of the federal government in Yellowstone National Park. As Thomas McNamee reported 20 years ago in The Return of the Wolf to Yellowstone, reintroduction was a venture as much political as ecological. Now comes Texas Monthly writer Blakeslee (Tulia: Race, Cocaine, and Corruption in a Small Texas Town, 2005) to chronicle just how true that observation remains. The author serves up two protagonists: a renegade biologist named Rick McIntyre who, more than any living individual, was instrumental in returning the wolf to its former home and keeping it safe there, and a wolf named O-Six, an alpha female who was a star in the social media world thanks to some canny promotion by reintroduction activists. As Blakeslee tracks O-Six’s movements through the Lamar Valley of Wyoming and surrounding areas, he examines the lives of other wolves in and around the park, some in her pack, others in competing wolf clans. O-Six’s travels led to tragedy, as he writes; he interviews the hunter who killed her, who proudly tells him, “I’m against wolves…I want to make sure that’s clear.” It is. Blakeslee takes pains to try to understand the views of hunters and ranchers while making sure that it’s similarly clear that the wolves merit a place in the sun. Along the way, he examines the long and ongoing back and forth of listing and delisting the wolf on the federal list of protected species, the wolf being, to many in the western states affected, a sort of federal agent and therefore automatically suspect.
In the main, Blakeslee’s well-rendered story will be familiar to anyone who has followed the Yellowstone wolves, but those who have not will find this a solid overview of recent events—evenhanded but clearly and rightly on the side of the wolves.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-90278-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
PROFILES
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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