Recommended reading for trivia buffs—or for anyone who has ever been assigned a paper on the subject of “food” or the...
Historian Jenkins (Lawn: A History of an American Obsession, not reviewed) serves up a helping of American history told from an unusual perspective.
The banana trade, commercial shipping, and Central American exporting have all been treated elsewhere, but here they are brought together in a single account with the goal of exploring the popular yellow fruit as a “window” into American cultural history. Probably few of us (who eat an average of 75 bananas a year) know that before the 1880s most Americans had never even seen a banana; by 1910, however, over three billion were being imported into the US annually and they are now America’s most popular fruit. The story of this transformation includes not just rough-and-tumble corporate strategy but also numerous cultural curiosities—and it is the latter that keeps it interesting. The image of the slapstick comedian slipping on a banana peel, for example, is very familiar; less well known is the fact that this image is handed down from a time when banana peels actually littered city streets so commonly as to pose a serious hazard. Urban legends of tarantulas lurking in banana bunches prove true to life, too (banana handlers wear rubber gloves to protect against the furry pests). Despite these amusing revelations, some chapters do tend to overlap, and Jenkins’s catalogue of banana information can become repetitive and trivial at times. Also, despite her hope of finding a “window” into American culture, the author’s analysis rarely penetrates much deeper than basic factual description.
Recommended reading for trivia buffs—or for anyone who has ever been assigned a paper on the subject of “food” or the “history of a product”—this is an amusing account that fails to live up to its grander ambitions.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-56098-966-1
Page Count: 232
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
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 Yorker staff 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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