A middling effort, but likely of some interest to students of European imperial history and contemporary geopolitics.
The life of French diplomat and engineering mastermind Ferdinand de Lesseps, driving force behind one of the world’s most celebrated canals.
Historian Karabell (A Visionary Nation, 2001, etc.) gives Lesseps (1805–94) his due and more in this homage. Karabell characterizes his widely traveled subject as “more a citizen of 19th-century Europe than he was of any one country,” though the great canal that he cut through the silt of the Sinai was of course made for the benefit of France and fulfilled one of Napoleon’s grand dreams. Karabell takes the Suez, completed in 1869, as one of the world’s grand constructions and more, a work with psychodramatic implications: “Lesseps himself would never have devoted himself so single-mindedly to implementing the project had he not suffered loss. . . . Disgrace and the death of his wife propelled him. His pain became the source of his inspiration, and his ambition, a way to heal himself.” That may well be, but the tens of thousands of Africans press-ganged by corvée into making Lesseps’s dream a reality were surely troubled by other pains. Granted, Karabell does a reasonably good job of describing the role of forced labor in the work of European empire-building in Africa. He shows, too, the effects of the Suez Canal on regional politics once it was built, extending the story into the 20th century, though giving only cursory treatment of events such as the Suez Crisis of 1956. His treatment of Lesseps himself tends toward the florid, while too often the surrounding narrative plods along datum by datum, point by point. The account suffers overall by comparison with David McCullough’s far better work on canal-building, The Path Between the Seas (1977), which considers Lesseps’s later efforts to build a canal across the Isthmus of Panama.
A middling effort, but likely of some interest to students of European imperial history and contemporary geopolitics.Pub Date: May 28, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-40883-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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