Well-told, effectively documented survey of a major historical subject.
The story of cotton, from the beginnings to its place in modern geopolitics.
Domesticated in both the Old and New Worlds, cotton’s comfort and versatility were obvious, but its labor-intensive cultivation and processing retarded its spread beyond its native regions. Yafa points out that the fiber came into fashion in Europe with the importing of Indian fabrics that combined comfort and colorful patterns. Soon after, the British seized India and acquired what was then the world’s main center of production. At the same time, cotton was becoming a staple of American agriculture, and it took on new importance with the mid-18th-century invention of machines to speed up its spinning and weaving. The spinning jenny, power loom, and cotton gin made it profitable, and the British industrial towns that were set up to exploit it set a pattern for other developing countries. In America, cotton towns were at first more benign than the British, and, eventually, mill workers’ opposition to southern slave labor led to the work being handed to immigrants. The end of slavery radically transformed the southern cotton industry, a trend accelerated by the arrival of the boll weevil, from Mexico, in the 1920s. The tale of cotton took another twist with the introduction of blue jeans, those work-clothes that became fashion statements for at least three generations. Once the focal point for the development of chemical pesticides, cotton now is on the cutting edge of genetic engineering and of nanotechnology. It is also a major cause for friction between the US, which subsidizes cotton farming in a major way, and the developing world, where farmers face a struggle to make a living wage in the face of US trade policy.
Well-told, effectively documented survey of a major historical subject.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2005
ISBN: 0-670-03367-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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
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