An excellent, thorough history in an age of our increasingly fraught relationships with natural resources.
Informative study of the crucial role of wood in the development of humans over centuries.
“I hope [this book] will show that for the vast majority of our time on this planet we have lived in an age dominated by this most versatile material, and that in many ways we still do,” writes Ennos, a professor of biological sciences who has authored textbooks on trees, statistics, and biomechanics. In this enthusiastic exploration, which begins in prehistory and moves to the present, the author digs deeply into paleoanthropology, tracking the earliest technological developments of man and what essentially brought them out of the forest—namely, climate change and the necessity of making fire. Ennos delves into a wide variety of disciplines, including social history, carpentry, geography, geology (specifically, how new energy sources such as peat and coal surpassed wood during the Industrial Revolution), and mechanical engineering. Even when iron and other materials replaced wood in some forms of construction, it still took wood (in the form of charcoal) to smelt the metals. “In the Middle Ages,” writes the author, “around thirty pounds of wood was needed to smelt one pound of iron.” Ennos also examines the supply of wood throughout history (into the 20th century, the New World’s vast forests seemed inexhaustible), the intense labor required to move timber to manufacturing sites, and the high level of skill and focus involved in carpentry. The innovation of pig iron, cast iron, and wrought iron—all of which Ennos describes knowledgeably—transformed building into the 19th century and beyond. Yet even despite the widespread acceptance of such modern materials as steel, concrete, and plastic, as well as energy (oil), wood has continued relevance today—plywood, laminated wood, and wood pulp, among other applications. The author corrects some deforestation myths, discusses ecological disaster, and concludes with ways of "mending our strained relationship” with wood.
An excellent, thorough history in an age of our increasingly fraught relationships with natural resources.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982114-73-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
HISTORY | NATURE | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY | ANCIENT | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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