Displays broad interests and a wide-ranging intellect, but the style—often bland or dully didactic—could use a bit of...
A chemist constructs a cultural history of sodium chloride and reveals its magnitude in human affairs.
In a volume burdened with a plethora of introductory material (there’s a foreword, preface, acknowledgments, and introduction—and each short chapter begins with an old-fashioned argument, as well), Laszlo makes it plain that salt is no ordinary white powder. (In fact, he reveals, pure salt is colorless.) He begins with a sort of pedagogical manifesto, declaring that all education, like his study, ought to be multidisciplinary, and then moves into some engaging chapters dealing with various uses (and abuses) of salt. Sailors once used it to disinfect wounds. It was one of the earliest means of preserving food. Many ancient trade routes involved the transportation of salt. The word (and concept of) salary has its origins in salt. We learn how seawater is desalinated, how salt was important in the history of Venice, how Gandhi employed it as a powerful symbol to rally his followers; we learn why the sea is salty (a puzzle: after all, only fresh water flows into it), why salt will clear a wine spill on a tablecloth, why salty foods make you thirsty, why salt will dispatch a slug and will both freeze ice cream and thaw an icy highway. Toward the end, he even waxes metaphysical. Although the volume for the most part is highly readable, Laszlo occasionally allows his erudition to obfuscate, as in one sentence that includes all the following: “mitochondrial RNA sequences,” “lipid bilayer,” “glycerol,” “ether bonds,” “RNA-polymerases,” “prokaryotes,” and “eukaryotes.” Yet he can also decline into the lowest puns—e.g., he follows a comment about Morton’s attempts to prevent the problem of the hardening of salt with this: “It being salt, they licked it.” Readers may also find annoying the editorial decision to permit the translator’s numerous notes to appear in the text instead of in unobtrusive footnotes.
Displays broad interests and a wide-ranging intellect, but the style—often bland or dully didactic—could use a bit of seasoning.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-231-12198-9
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2001
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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