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THE SEVEN STATES OF CALIFORNIA

A NATURAL AND HUMAN HISTORY

With the light, revealing touch of a master reporter, Fradkin (Wanderings of an Environmental Journalist, 1993, etc.) takes the Golden State's measure, top to bottom. For the author, California is seven states rolled into one, with landscape playing the defining role: Deserts (southeast), Sierra (east), Land of Fire (northwest), Land of Water (north coast), the Great Valley (central interior), the Fractured Province (central coast), and the Profligate Province (south coast). Each of these substates draws its internal cohesiveness not only from geography but also from economics, customs, heritage, and culture. In each region Fradkin has discovered some powerful landscape element, a particularly distinctive node of pyschogeographical intensity, such as the deserts' dry lakes, with their intaglios and bombing ranges; the sierra passes that tested every westward-bound emigrant's mettle; the divisive, despoiling role of timber in the Land of Water. Each of these features serves as a lodestone for chunks of history (Fradkin judiciously employs fragments of period diaries to give the narrative pungency) and for his own detailed, filigreed observations. The text is salted with shrewd minibiographies, of everyone from William Mulholland (the man who brought water to LA and trouble to Jack Nicholson in Chinatown) and Harry Chandler (owner of the Los Angeles Times) to survivors of the infamous Donner Party and the fishermen of Humboldt Bay. Bitingly ever-present is the explosive racial hatred that has marked California's history since Europeans moved in: Tensions between whites and Native Americans, Chinese, African-Americans, Japanese, East Indians, Mexicans, and Filipinos have roiled and boiled through the centuries. California might be ``beguiling and lyrically beautiful,'' but it is also suspect terrain: chaotic and unstable, a violent medley, a land of extremes. Fascinating, intimate, and readable in the extreme. (30 b&w photos, not seen)

Pub Date: July 24, 1995

ISBN: 0-8050-1947-2

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1995

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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