A timely and refreshingly provocative study.
A noted academic challenges traditional interpretations of race, the environment, and economic progress.
“Mountains hold the echoes of history,” writes Goffe in the opening of a fascinating narrative that confronts the historic dynamic of climate and race in the Caribbean and examines the region as an experimental center—a “dark laboratory”—that was exploited by the greed of Western capitalists, beginning when Columbus walked ashore on the island of Guanahani in 1492. The best writing in any form leaves the reader with something to ponder, and Goffe’s criticism of, and skepticism about, nearly every aspect of Western academic assumptions concerning the climate crisis, imperialism, and race does just that. Goffe is an associate professor at Hunter College, City University of New York, and her extensively footnoted research lends academic rigor to her chronicle of this interconnectedness, in addition to the intriguing and creative solutions that she offers. This is also a deeply personal book. At times, Goffe’s forays into her own heritage can get overly speculative, but they add necessary perspective and an insightful vantage point to the importance of ancestral knowledge and its relevance to unwinding traditional narratives of Blackness and the forced labor of Chinese workers. Her ear for nature’s notes is just as sharp as those of naturalists Hans Sloane and Theodore Roosevelt, who are but two figures that come under her withering scrutiny. Goffe engages with complex ideas and history, and the book is not the easiest of reads. But she proves to be an engaging scholar, and her work will go far in reshaping academic approaches to her most interesting subject matter.
A timely and refreshingly provocative study.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780385549912
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
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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