by Rick Bass ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2009
A welcome installment in Bass’s ongoing place-centered autobiography.
A fan’s notes on wilderness, log-cabin life, grizzly bears and other aspects of the American outback.
Bass (Why I Came West, 2008, etc.) returns to the form of his early book Winter (1991), recording a year in the Yaak Valley of northwestern Montana, an uncommonly lush and marshy tract of forest that, at 1,800 feet, is the state’s lowest elevation. This does not keep the Yaak from posing challenges aplenty in winter, in the thick of which the book opens. Bass strikes a Thoreauvian note at the outset, contrasting his contemplative life in the woods with other possibilities: “I’m not talking about out-and-out government-loathing misanthropy, not the survivalist’s manifesto kind of hunkering down, but something more peaceable and searching.” Considering that the Unabomber’s cabin and Ruby Ridge are both located not so far away, the apology isn’t misplaced, but it soon becomes apparent that there’s no misanthropy here, even if the events related aren’t entirely peaceable. (Nature is, after all, red in tooth and claw.) Bass takes a philosophical view of wilderness and the need to protect it, ascribing to the world a desire for order that admits human participation. In all this he is more conversational and less clenched of jaw than in previous essays. As the year progresses, the author takes the reader from days of endless gray sky, sideways-falling snow—indeed, at one point he recounts ten days without a break in snowfall—and winter blues (“like the effects of too many concussions”), to a superheated summer in which wildfire threatens to destroy his family’s home. In the end, the importance of family is what emerges most strongly, with Bass pondering whether his daughters’ lives will be made the better for their having grown up so far away from shopping malls, television and the other amenities of postmodern life.
A welcome installment in Bass’s ongoing place-centered autobiography.Pub Date: July 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-547-05516-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2009
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
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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BOOK TO SCREEN
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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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