Taking his title from a Mark Twain satire, Steinberg teases from the parched earth of property law a nifty morality tale about the notion of ``owning'' nature. The urge to own a piece of the pie goes back to time immemorial, but advanced capitalism has brought it to ludicrous new heights. By turns farceur and parabolist, Steinberg (History/New Jersey Institute of Technology) serves up five of the more egregious examples of the need to own: Blackbird Bend, once in Nebraska and now in Iowa, where speculators sought to profit from a shifting river channel, pilfering Native American treaty lands in the process; the bayou country of Louisiana, where the speed of the flow determines who can profit from the oil nestled under the waterscape (hint: it's not the Creoles); Arizona's precious aquifers, where pricey deep wells suck the water table dry, with ruination not just for the driller, but for the neighbors as well; Fulton County, Pa., where cloud seeding threatened to tilt the playing field in favor of some farmers over others; and air rights (real estate losing its attachment to the earth), in which political clout (read money) allows you to steal sunlight from those living in the shadow of your skyscraper. Steinberg's fascination with the minutiae of the legal process can feel like fistfuls of sand being flung in your eyes, but for the most part, the language is brightened by a wit that relishes incongruities and lambastes greed, arrogance, and narcissism. ``Put simply,'' he writes, ``property law evolved in a way that helped turn more and more of the planet into less and less, benefiting fewer and fewer.'' In the culture of property, the spirit of law is the domination of nature and everything has a price tag. Steinberg gives bite to that old refrain—the rich get richer, the poor poorer, and the courts smooth the way. (Photos, not seen)
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-520-08763-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
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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