A focused insider’s guide to Burning Man and a posthumous nod to its intrepid creator.
The artistry and kaleidoscopic wonder behind the Burning Man experience.
In this fascinating, immersive exploration of the annual weeklong bohemian festival, journalist Shister begins with the event’s grassroots genesis in 1986 as a bonfire in San Francisco first lit by Larry Harvey to assuage a broken heart. To the author, the Bay Area was a place where social rules became “pliant” as the first pulses of a digital revolution coursed across Silicon Valley. As much as Shister’s charming narrative is a tribute to the festival itself, it is also a timely honorarium to Harvey, who died in 2018. The book touches on Harvey’s creatively intelligent, offbeat youth in Oregon, where he tested his practical father’s patience and then figured out how to avoid compulsory military service. Acknowledging that Harvey’s initial vision was light-years away from the $45-million-per-year Black Rock City nonprofit it has morphed into today, Shister moves through episodes of controversy between artists and organizers, financial challenges (Burning Man is a “no-cash zone”), and firsthand accounts of his experiences as a regular attendee who’d first become a “Baby Burner” in 2013. A visit with founding wunderkinds familiarized the author with Burning Man’s Ten Principles (decommodification, radical inclusion, leaving no trace, etc.) and the brainstorming visualizations of festival organization. Each year, Shister notes, the extravaganza integrates more complex music, LED lighting, thematic microcosms, decompression after-events, and gigantic art sculptures, as if in genuflection to the towering steel-structured “psychic landmark” namesake. The book’s pictorial section doesn’t do justice to the dazzling amount of artistry, emotion, passion, and creativity on display at Black Rock City, but Shister does a splendid job of sketching in the features and the future of Burning Man and its residual global influence with a vivid narrative and anecdotal interviews.
A focused insider’s guide to Burning Man and a posthumous nod to its intrepid creator.Pub Date: July 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64009-219-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
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
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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