Shelve this fine history next to Tim Pat Coogan’s The Famine Plot.
What was the true cause of Ireland's deadly disaster?
Scanlan, author of Slave Empire: How Slavery Made Modern Britain, turns his attention to Ireland’s infamous potato blight, or “apocalypse.” Between 1845 and 1851, at least a million people died and more than 1.5 million migrated. The famine, a “complex, ecological, economic, logistical, and political disaster,” he argues, “was a consequence of colonialism.” The newly formed United Kingdom’s press on the Irish economy and its people, which they looked down on, made the potato a precious subsistence staple along with pigs, which were usually sold, and peat. Ireland became a “casualty of modern capitalism at its most corrosive and destructive.” Scanlan neatly chronicles the history of England’s ever-growing Protestant financial exploitation over the “uncivilized” Catholic Ireland’s poor and their tenant farms. Grain, dairy, and meat were exported at very low U.K.-set prices. The country had been subjugated by conquest, colonialism, and capitalism even before the famine made it a nation of debtors and beggars susceptible to subsistence crises and epidemic disease. The potato blight—Phytophthora infestans—struck in 1845 in North America, Canada, Belgium, and the Netherlands before striking Ireland in August due to excess moisture and quickly turning into a famine. Scanlan goes into detail discussing the famine’s effect on British politics and its relief measures for Ireland, including offering them maize to buy. By winter 1846-1847, “rural Ireland became a hellscape, shocking and incomprehensible.” The bonds of social life “dissolved.” England’s “public works were shambolic as well as bureaucratic.” The last years of the blight, 1848-1849, were the worst. Starvation and disease surged. Organizations around the world raised funds. Soup kitchens and workhouses proliferated while evictions soared. For England, the Great Famine proved that Ireland was still a “half-civilised colony.”
Shelve this fine history next to Tim Pat Coogan’s The Famine Plot.Pub Date: March 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781541601543
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 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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