A volume that is like a Eurail Pass that will carry you through gorgeous terrain you will want to explore in more depth.
With a subtitle that serves as a swift, sweet summary, an adjunct professor (Entomology and Ecology, Evolutionary Biology/Univ. of Arizona) compresses the cultural and natural history of flowers into a few hundred graceful pages.
Buchmann—the author of numerous scholarly papers and books, including The Forgotten Pollinators (1996), co-written with Gary Paul Nabhan—realizes he has an impossible task: every chapter could be a fat book, so he draws a map of a remarkable world. The early sections deal with biology, which he knows well and explains clearly. The author reminds us of the parts of plants, the evolution of flowers, the role of pollen-carrying critters that include, of course, bees but also moths, butterflies, and even bats. History plays a major role in just about every chapter. How did the Egyptians use flowers? The Chinese? Victorian England? The American Founding Fathers? Buchmann notes that many of the latter were very interested in gardens—including, of course, Benjamin Franklin, who did experiments. Charles Darwin, Luther Burbank, Gregor Mendel—these and other notables arrive now and then for a visit, and there are allusions to a wide variety of artists, including Shakespeare, Walt Whitman (but no Emily Dickinson?), and Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. We learn about flowers as gifts, as burial ornaments, as food (becoming more popular again, notes the author), as personal decoration (remember your prom?), and as medical treatments. Buchmann explains how honey (about which he has a lot to say) is now returning to hospitals, where some physicians use it as part of a treatment regimen for burn victims. We also learn about the commercial aspects. No surprise: Valentine’s Day is the biggest single purchase day in the United States.
A volume that is like a Eurail Pass that will carry you through gorgeous terrain you will want to explore in more depth.Pub Date: July 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-5552-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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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