An intriguing, revelatory historical perspective.
Weaving in the world.
Armstrong, a historian of the material culture of Asia, investigates the political, economic, and cultural role of handwoven carpets, splendid artifacts of superb craftsmanship. Her meticulously researched survey focuses on 12 carpets, from a knotted-pile rug from Siberia, dating from the 3rd or 4th century B.C.E., to a 21st-century rug woven in Pakistan for commercial export. Even as early as the Iron Age the painstaking technology of rug-making already had evolved into a mature art form, likely carried out by nomads. From earliest times, Armstrong asserts, carpet weavers have been women, honing their skills in carding, spinning, dyeing, knotting, setting warps and wefts, and designing or reproducing patterns. Considerable skill, as well, Armstrong has found, is involved in rug restoration and repair. For centuries, rugs have been associated with the rich and powerful: Potentates, chieftains, robber barons, and collectors considered the acquisition of prized rugs as a reflection of their own status. Attribution of a rug’s creation and provenance also connects to power. The startling beauty of a particular rug in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum led to the assumption that it was made by a team of men. That conclusion, Armstrong asserts, “suited a nineteenth-century Western view which held that if an object was art then it was created by men, and that what women practised was a lesser form of creativity described in the West as craft.” Armstrong reveals the exploitation of rug makers that continues to the present. Twenty-first-century rugs sold in department stores are often crafted by “weary refugees in makeshift encampments” who create products for international trade to design and color specifications and are marketed through export houses. Nevertheless, as Armstrong’s richly detailed history shows, even modern rugs can shimmer with glamor and mystique.
An intriguing, revelatory historical perspective.Pub Date: June 17, 2025
ISBN: 9781250321435
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
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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