A well-written contribution to the history of infrastructure.
Vigorous history of a highway intended to run the length of the Americas, as yet unbuilt.
The Pan-American Highway has existed—on paper, that is—since 1923, when U.S. boosters attempted to convince Latin America’s governments to throw in on a project that would allow unimpeded automobile travel from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. As it is, writes Brigham Young University history professor Miller, the highway is instead “two very long cul-de-sacs, each separated from the other by ninety-eight straight-line kilometers of tropical forest,” with Colombia and Panama the only countries on Earth without a single road link. There are geographical considerations, of course: Such a highway would pass through just about every ecosystem there is, courting dangers of everything from altitude sickness to malaria. But the political considerations are more significant still: Costa Rica has blocked off most traffic from neighboring Nicaragua to curb migration, and the U.S., of course, is busily trying to build a wall across the length of the border with Mexico. “You cannot get there from here because too many Americans up and down the hemisphere concluded that good fences rather than good roads made for good neighbors,” writes Miller. All this flies in the face of an odd reality. As Miller writes, by 2050 there are projected to be 60% more road miles in the world than today, but, as Indian statisticians have observed, the economic benefits will be largely elusive in the developing world. Corruption abounds, too, wherever roads are built. That fact has not daunted China’s ambitions in Latin America, and Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road global project is pushing billions of dollars toward the construction of “ports, railroads, airports, and highways,” the better to carry goods and revenues to Beijing—one reason for the U.S. to take more interest in the matter.
A well-written contribution to the history of infrastructure.Pub Date: today
ISBN: 9780520416932
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2026
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
