A detailed account of the Hudson River Valley.
Environmentalist and journalist Stone (Tropical Forests and the Human Spirit, 2001, etc.) provides an enthusiastic and comprehensive chronology of the river and its surrounding valley. Delivering “up to 1.5 billion gallons of water a day to more than nine million customers,” the Hudson River Valley is the main source of water for New York City. Consequently, it comes as no surprise that this area has been the source of many environmental battles in the past two centuries. Recent threats to the river basin include a proposed casino that could attract six million visitors a year, budget cuts to many projects that currently protect the Hudson from “new increments of nutrient or toxic pollution to the watershed” and the current process to extract natural gas known as “fracking.” Stone examines the specifics of numerous action groups creating many new projects to restore and revive the river—e.g., the Walkway Over the Hudson, a restored railway bridge turned pedestrian walkway, and the Hudson River Park. The creation of state and local parks for hiking, renovated small-town waterfronts full of art galleries and restaurants, “well-managed small and tidy fruit, vegetable, and dairy farms” and numerous colleges—Bard, Marist, SUNY New Paltz and others—have turned the valley’s industrial and polluted past into a present state of commerce, art, education and recreation. Illustrations and a map included. The specifics of the Hudson River Valley supplied by an ardent lover of the area.
Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7627-6395-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
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 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
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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