Illuminating and disturbing, and expansively documented.
A provocative assembling of evidence from history, archaeology and anthropology that what we call civilization may carry the seeds of its own destruction.
Already a bestseller in his native Canada, essayist Wright is now making his biggest mark since his debut novel (A Scientific Romance, 1997) attracted wide attention. The “progress” in the present title is purely ironic: These case studies—of ancient Sumer, the Maya in Central America, Rome, Greece and others—aim to show man as a parasitic species that constantly violates its own first rule of survival: “Don’t kill off your host.” In setting the scene, the author, perhaps most controversially, asserts that Stone Age hunters regularly drove their prey into extinction. As he tracks major transitions in the two linked “experiments” of agriculture and civilization that coincided with the opening of a favorable climate window in Neolithic times, Wright is logical and penetrating: The former wheat fields of Mesopotamia’s fertile crescent are now salt pans and flood plains in Iraq, and some 200,000 Roman farmers were on federal subsistence by the time the Gothic horde reached Rome in the fourth century. On Easter Island, somebody cut down the last tree standing to make rollers in order to situate a freshly carved monolith. And if Earth’s climate is better today than it’s ever been, Wright postulates, what happens if it reverts (as it has before, taking only decades) to its norm of extreme shifts? “As we domesticated the plants, they domesticated us. Without us, they die; without them, so do we.” The author declares outright that farmland the size of Scotland, much of it in Asia, is lost every year. Terrorist suicide bombers are nothing new, he asserts, citing Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, written a century ago, and they’re a small threat compared to hunger, disease or climate change. Attacking terrorism’s causes rather than its symptoms, he believes, might also save civilization from itself.
Illuminating and disturbing, and expansively documented.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7867-1547-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
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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