An inviting and edifying introduction to the improvers, who “offered an opposite kind of change from the blaze and shift of...
An engaging examination of the early proponents of restorative husbandry—their origins, motivations, and how their ideas played out—from Yale historian Stoll.
By the 1820s, agricultural soil in the US was showing signs of desperate wear, even exhaustion. To counter this situation, a movement grew, most noticeably in the northern states, to return health to the soil, headed by a group who came to be known as “improvers.” Proto-environmentalists, they called for a restorative husbandry with manure anchoring the nutrient cycle in a delicate system of return that held the promise of a steady state for farming. Stoll explains, in a pleasingly conversational style, that the improvers had politics and money on their minds more than an environmental ethic; renewed soil meant a stable population, which was important for representation in Washington: it spoke of economic independence with commercial opportunity and was seen as a rearguard process to slow the process of state formation. While it worked for the yeoman farmer of the Northeast—where small holdings and a varied farming agenda were at work—it held little prospect for the plantation owner in the South, whose scale was too large for such intensive treatment, while the frontier provided a rationale for wasteful farming practices. But improvers also possessed an important notion (if less ballyhooed than Manifest Destiny) that small is beautiful (“a stake in state and neighborhood, a sentiment for land well established and passed down”). Stoll provides examples in Pennsylvania farms and South Carolina plantations, and he also looks at the moment when conservation began to turn as much on ethics as economics.
An inviting and edifying introduction to the improvers, who “offered an opposite kind of change from the blaze and shift of nineteenth-century America.”Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-8090-6431-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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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