Intellectual and environmental history merge in a useful study of one of the world’s great natural wonders. Pyne (Vestal Fire, 1997, etc.), the MacArthur Award—winning author of several books on the Grand Canyon, returns to the same setting here with this history of how the American view of nature changed as a result of explorers— encounters with the mile-deep terrestrial fissure. In the mid-19th century, Pyne writes, Americans were inclined to view such features of the landscape as challenges to be overcome, not as scenic splendors: —popular instincts argued that river-dashed gorges were hazards, not adventures.— It was thanks to a generation of intellectuals—and especially geologists, Clarence Dutton foremost among them—that the weird, imposing land forms visible in and around the Grand Canyon would come to be seen as —the coliseums, temples, and statuary of an inspired nature.— Until that time, Pyne notes, the canyon was known but not publicized; the project of intellectuals to claim it as a national treasure without peer in the world was a step in creating a general consciousness of public lands that would in some instances become the first national parks. Dutton wrote celebratory studies and gave exalted place names (Point Sublime, Point Imperial) to spits of land overlooking the chasm. Meanwhile, his contemporary Thomas Moran painted masterful panoramas that were widely published in journals and helped to lure tourists to the region. Later, canyon aficionados like Joseph Wood Krutch continued the call. —The Canyon claims standing,— Pyne concludes, —not because of its size or antiquity but, as Dutton had insisted, by virtue of its ever-evolving ensemble and the ideas continually made available by which to interpret it.— The many ideas contained in Pyne’s book alone will help that interpretation along nicely. (16 pages b&w photos, 3 maps, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88110-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1998
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlanticsenior 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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Vintage McCullough and a book that students of American history will find captivating.
A lively history of the Ohio River region in the years between the Revolution and the Civil War.
McCullough (The American Spirit: Who We Are and What We Stand For, 2015, etc.) isn’t writing about the sodbusters and hardscrabblers of the Far West, the people whom the word “pioneers” evokes, but instead their predecessors of generations past who crossed the Appalachians and settled in the fertile country along and north of the Ohio River. Manasseh Cutler, one of his principal figures, “endowed with boundless intellectual curiosity,” anticipated the movement of his compatriots across the mountains well before the war had ended, advocating for the Northwest Ordinance to secure a region that, in McCullough’s words, “was designed to guarantee what would one day be known as the American way of life”—a place in which slavery was forbidden and public education and religious freedom would be emphasized. “Ohio fever” spread throughout a New England crippled, after the war, by economic depression, but Southerners also moved west, fomenting the conditions that would, at the end of McCullough’s vivid narrative, end in regional war three generations later. Characteristically, the author suggests major historical themes without ever arguing them as such. For example, he acknowledges the iniquities of the slave economy simply by contrasting the conditions along the Ohio between the backwaters of Kentucky and the sprightly city of Cincinnati, speaking through such figures as Charles Dickens. Indeed, his narrative abounds with well-recognized figures in American history—John Quincy Adams, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Johnny Appleseed—while highlighting lesser-known players. His account of Aaron Burr—who conspired to overthrow the government of Mexico (and, later, his own country) after killing Alexander Hamilton, recruiting confederates in the Ohio River country—is alone worth the price of admission. There are many other fine moments, as well, including a brief account of the generosity that one farmer in Marietta, Ohio, showed to his starving neighbors and another charting the fortunes of the early Whigs in opposing the “anti-intellectual attitude of the Andrew Jackson administration.”
Vintage McCullough and a book that students of American history will find captivating.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6868-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2019
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