A heartfelt tribute to badly battered folks whose “gritty blue-collar pluck,” declares Wells, may yet save their bayou way...
Vivid re-creation of Hurricane Katrina’s devastating impact on an unusual fishing community outside New Orleans.
A Louisiana native, Condé Nast Portfolio senior editor Wells (Crawfish Mountain, 2007, etc.) spent several months interviewing shrimp- and oyster-boat captains and other hurricane survivors in St. Bernard Parish (pop. 67,000), a former pirate haven whose gumbo of cultures has given rise to a distinctive way of life. Unlike their sophisticated big-city neighbors, these Louisiana bayou residents have for generations led lives centered on “sin, cooking, drinking, eating, fighting, fishing, sex, and love,” he writes; they build boats in the backyards of their shotgun shacks and mobile homes, and hang out in saloons like the Bucket of Blood. For many, riding out hurricanes was a family tradition, but nothing prepared them for Katrina, which in 2005 leveled most of the parish and claimed 132 lives, 35 of them at a nursing home that failed to evacuate. Fifty-one-year-old shrimper Ricky Robin, grand-nephew of a swashbuckling New Orleans swordsman, and others in the Robin family stand center stage in this well-written survival saga. Wells begins with the struggle to secure fishing trawlers in the Violet Canal during the storm’s early surges; recounts the perilous experiences of people stranded in trees, lofts and cars amid rising waters; and describes many heroic rescues made by boat captains in the four days before military help arrived. He nicely captures the flavor and color of the moment, from Ricky playing “When the Saints Go Marching In” on his trumpet on the deck of his vessel to calm 45 rescued people, to two weary, storm-tossed survivors, meeting for the first time after separate exhausting ordeals, laughingly swapping survival stories. The author unabashedly celebrates the courage and pride of people in this “forgotten backwater” when faced with the hurricane’s onslaught. By 2007, the parish had regained about half of its pre-Katrina population, with most residents living in trailers and modular housing.
A heartfelt tribute to badly battered folks whose “gritty blue-collar pluck,” declares Wells, may yet save their bayou way of life.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-300-12152-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2008
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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