If Florida is the poster child for a nation’s fiscal and political disintegration, Hiaasen is the state’s galloping knight...
Miami Herald columnist and best-selling novelist Hiaasen (Bad Monkey, 2013, etc.) wages a relentless war of words against those who would despoil his home state and cheapen a nation: the greedy, the corrupt and the stupid.
The author knows better than most Edward Abbey’s dictum: Growth for its own sake, unrestrained, is the philosophy of the cancer cell. As Florida’s population grows, taxpayers usually foot the bill not only for sprawl and environmental degradation, but also for every crackpot scheme heralding an economic boon. In this collection of his muckraking columns, Hiaasen employs a seasoned bullshit detector that is among the most acute in American journalism. He pillories everything from coastal development run amok to the folly of offshore oil drilling, from efforts at gutting the Environmental Protection Agency and Endangered Species Act to bungling by the Army Corps of Engineers. While dissections of decay dominate, also in his cross hairs are capital punishment, corporate welfare, “intelligent design,” Medicare fraud, corporate lobbyists, manipulated elections, mortgage scams, legislative complicity in the exploitation of migrant workers, Vatican stonewalling on child sexual abuse, the National Rifle Association’s disproportionate influence, feckless televangelists, a hyperventilating news media and, of course, the Iraq/Afghanistan debacle. Though he occasionally goes to the well once too often, Hiaasen, also a writer of satirical fiction, wields the facts, finely tuned outrage and an eviscerating sarcasm to potent effect. Were his broadsides not armed with solid reportage, these columns might begin to sound overheated—a scathingly anti-business, anti-Republican rant—save that he invariably dispenses scorn (or credit) where it’s due, to whomever deserves it. Hiaasen is not so much unabashedly liberal as steadfastly sensible, his humor fueled by righteous dismay.
If Florida is the poster child for a nation’s fiscal and political disintegration, Hiaasen is the state’s galloping knight (in)errant, slaying the dragons of ineptitude, arrogance and idiocy.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-80702-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
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
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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