A rousing tale of a species’ survival.
A majestic history of the bald eagle and how it has reflected the nation’s changing relationship to nature.
Davis, whose 2017 book The Gulf won the Kirkus Prize and the Pulitzer Prize, creates an equally sweeping cultural and natural history centered on the majestic bald eagle, a bird endemic only to North America. Regarded as the king of the avian species, symbolizing “fidelity, self-reliance, strength, and courage,” in 1782, the bald eagle was chosen to be emblazoned on the Great Seal of the United States. Debate over the image was, unsurprisingly, vigorous; Benjamin Franklin, it was rumored, proposed a turkey. The eagle prevailed, however, representing “the picture of the nation’s full-fledged independence and sovereignty.” As much as the image inspired patriotic pride, some people—farmers who accused them of preying on livestock and even John James Audubon, who called the bird “ferocious” and “overbearing”—derided them. Farmers killed them, and so did early naturalists. Lacking cameras and binoculars, felling eagles was the only way to investigate them closely. Eagles, Davis writes, were “sentenced to death by the ornithology of the day.” By the late 19th century, however, attitudes about humans’ responsibility to nature began to change. Although in “a land of plenty” there seemed no need for conservation movements, the threat of bald eagles’ extinction ignited efforts to save the species. By 1900, 22 states had Audubon societies, and some states outlawed the hunting of eagles. Examination of their migration patterns, courtship, breeding, and communication revealed that eagles displayed “fidelity to both spouse and home,” were caring parents, and had no interest in carrying off human babies—once a widespread fear. In the 1950s, however, the potent pesticide DDT emerged as a devastating threat, causing nest failures: eggs not being laid and laid ones failing to hatch. The author’s consistently lively, captivating narrative celebrates the naturalists, scientists, activists, artists (Andy Warhol, among them), politicians, and breeders who have championed the extraordinary “charismatic raptor.”
A rousing tale of a species’ survival.Pub Date: March 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63149-525-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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