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PALO ALTO

A HISTORY OF CALIFORNIA, CAPITALISM, AND THE WORLD

A highly readable revisionist history of the Golden State, sharply argued and well researched.

A searching history of California and its role in predatory, extractive capitalism.

“California is very important for me,” wrote Karl Marx in 1880, “because nowhere else has the upheaval most shamelessly caused by capitalist centralization taken place with such speed.” Native son Harris, who quotes Marx’s apothegm, begins his story of that upheaval with the Ohlone, Indigenous inhabitants of the Bay Area who were mistakenly assumed to have disappeared in a wave of genocide. It’s easy to understand the confusion, since so many Native peoples were wiped out in the rush to ravage the lands and waters of California. The business of making a few people wealthy was the work of many. Chinese laborers, who were so instrumental in building the railroads, also labored in the farm fields until Mexican workers replaced them. The Irish and Swiss Italians did well in politics and winemaking, facing less prejudice than elsewhere, but as for people of color—well, consider that Palo Alto banned buildings over 40 feet high from residential areas, the better to control access to housing by lower-income people. Palo Alto is, of course, the home of Stanford University, which Harris sees as foil and fulcrum of the military-industrial complex. Said one dissident in the 1970s, “The university isn’t a temple of the intellect or a place where disinterested scholars examine the world,” but instead a hub of military research. While Harris nods with some appreciation to the techno-libertarians who invented the personal computer, he also urges that the real heroes were the builders and not the venture capitalists, those who have since become Silicon Valley royalty. In closing this long but consistently engaging narrative, the author proposes a program of divestiture and restitution, including “the forfeit of Stanford’s vast accumulated wealth,” that is breathtaking in its audacity—and probably doesn’t stand a chance of being put in place.

A highly readable revisionist history of the Golden State, sharply argued and well researched.

Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2023

ISBN: 9780316592031

Page Count: 720

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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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

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

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

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