paper 0-8032-6397-X An illuminating study of local resistance to a huge federal water project. Although rivers crisscross South Dakota, environmental journalist Carrels writes, much of the land is semiarid and only marginally suited to agriculture. This did not stop 19th-century boosters from proclaiming that the mere act of farming brought on rain—“rain follows the plow,” one promotional jingle assured would-be settlers—and from beseeching the federal government to harness the power of the Missouri and other rivers for agricultural irrigation. When the government finally did step in, the Bureau of Reclamation secured some 350,000 acres of fertile river bottomlands from their reluctant Indian owners and set in motion a huge and expensive series of dams collectively called the Oahe Irrigation Project. Controversial from the start (the bureau’s own experts concluded that local soils were not conducive to irrigation on the scale the government proposed), the project met concerted resistance from a group of local farmers, in whose interest the dam building program was ostensibly undertaken; these farmers, Carrels writes, “believed the bureau was mistaken about fundamental issues such as soil irrigability, drainage, and the project’s cost-benefit economics. And they were convinced that the bureau had intentionally withheld information about Oahe from those who would be directly impacted by its development.” Although the project enjoyed the strong support of South Dakota senator George McGovern and other politicians, the opposition had the talents of environmental activists and up-and-coming politicians like current senator Tom Daschle, and when McGovern was voted out of office in 1980, the Oahe project began to collapse. Carrels holds that Oahe “is the only federal reclamation project that was halted while under construction,” and he does a fine job of telling just how this came to pass. Of interest to students of Western American resource issues, as well as of grassroots political organizing.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8032-1496-0
Page Count: 263
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
