by Roy Scranton ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 17, 2018
Despite the inevitable repetitions, Scranton’s warnings must be heeded…again and again.
Essays on war and the “eve of what may be the human world’s greatest catastrophe.”
Novelist and journalist Scranton (English/Notre Dame Univ.; War Porn, 2016, etc.) collects essays and talks, most previously published, that primarily cover climate change, serving with the Army in the Middle East, race, and contemporary war literature. The author is clearly frustrated and angry, and he is doing his level best to face the doom and gloom. As he writes in the title essay, “we stand today on a precipice of annihilation that Nietzsche could not have even imagined.” In fact, he admits, “it’s probably already too late to stop apocalyptic planetary warming.” At this moment of crisis, we must use our “human drive to make meaning…[it’s] our only salvation.” In “Arctic Ghosts,” Scranton recounts a 2015 cruise he took in Canada. He writes about John Franklin’s 1845 failed expedition to find the Northwest Passage. Today, his cruise succeeded: “I was overtaken by the realization that what I’d come to see was already gone.” Our planet had warmed “beyond anything civilization has ever seen.” In “Rock Scissors Paper,” which he describes as a “Borgesian bastard,” the author riffs about our new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, “characterized by the advent of the human species as a geological force.” No one, he writes, “intended this, and we seem to be incapable of preventing it.” In “Anthropocene City,” Scranton chronicles his tour of heavily polluted Galveston Bay, “so full of PCBs, pesticides, dioxin, and petrochemicals that fishing is widely restricted.” When he writes about his personal involvement in war, it comes almost as a relief. In the book’s longest essay, the powerful “Back to Baghdad,” he returned as a journalist: “They stayed, I left. But while I may have left Iraq, Iraq hadn’t left me.”
Despite the inevitable repetitions, Scranton’s warnings must be heeded…again and again.Pub Date: July 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61695-936-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
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edited by Torie Bosch & Roy Scranton
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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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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