An exploration of minerals that gleams with substance and authority.
Pursuing the “strange abstract hunger that follows us all.”
A rock hound and fossil fanatic from childhood, Marsden, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, grasped early on that another world lay hidden beneath our surface realm. The Cornish author’s book bores into the history, science, and consequences of mining and metallurgy, accorded greater depth and range by personal experiences and his recent journeys to European mines and mining towns. He explores metals and metal-bearing matrixes integral to human culture—ochre, tin, peat, bronze, silver, radium, aerolite, mercury, copper, gold, lithium, and soil—and the veins our uses of metals have taken. But just as fascinating are his reflections, mythological asides, and the historical figures whose lives he alloys with the narrative. Chief among Marsden’s essays on disparate but notable individuals is a magisterial appreciation of Goethe. In many respects, the history of metals defines the strata of human development, with pivotal successes and sometimes deadly consequences. Marsden, also a gifted fiction and travel writer, invests a portion of the book in a reconsideration of alchemy, long “eclipsed by the glare of reason and the Enlightenment,” but whose arcane texts are now regarded as a proto-science, with methodologies and a spirit of discovery that helped spur the scientific revolution. Yet as Marsden demonstrates, all things have their price, in metals’ case those of greed, resource depletion, and environmental decay. His study also yields nuggets of insight into the Big Questions, offered with humility. And girded throughout by some of the loveliest descriptive writing one will read anywhere: “Beneath our feet, if we look closely, are shards of heaven, and overhead are wonders too, and everywhere is the ceaseless dance of the universe—endlessly moving, endlessly changing, endlessly mysterious.”
An exploration of minerals that gleams with substance and authority.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781640097445
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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