This magisterial but unsentimental journey reminds us of what else has been lost at sea.
In too deep.
A sweeping overview of the “anchor-outs” living on abandoned vessels in Richardson Bay, on the outskirts of the wealthy Bay Area city of Sausalito, Kloc’s book unites personal narrative with historical context. A reporter and senior editor at Harper’s magazine, Kloc tells of the denizens of this latter-day Cannery Row who include “retired mariners, single mothers, runaways, addicts, and many others who have caught a bad break from which they haven’t yet recovered.” He is befriended by the self-dubbed “Innate Thought,” a fixture on the scene who uses his “encyclopedic knowledge of American maritime jurisprudence” to help fight the city’s attempts to remove these sailors from the sea. The author eats, drinks, and shares stories but resists the traps of condescension and false familiarity as he paints a portrait of inequities of “Chinatown”-like proportions that date back to the Gold Rush. Befitting Sausalito’s bohemian past, the raffish crew bait the powers that be, reminding them of broken promises to build a homeless shelter. However convivial, the largely white anchor-outs represent an unrepresentative sample, in keeping with Marin County’s history of de facto segregation, relegating Black shipbuilders in World War II to Marin City, a comfortable distance from wealthier neighbors. Their trials, while undeniably real, seem less dire than those of their compatriots in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District and other urban redoubts. But the book fulfills the author’s purpose of documenting this community “when they were under the greatest threat of their one-hundred-year existence. It is the story of what we all stand to destroy when unhoused and low-income communities are allowed to be flattened out of their humanity and…torn apart by ill-considered, profit-driven policies that ask them to pick up and move along, as if, in tearing down camp and scattering in all directions, they have nothing left to lose.”
This magisterial but unsentimental journey reminds us of what else has been lost at sea.Pub Date: today
ISBN: 9780063061699
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 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
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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