Natural history par excellence.
A sweeping natural history of North America from its birth as a self-contained continent in the Cretaceous era to its current precarious status as an ecological superpower.
Australian mammologist Flannery (Throwim Way Leg, 1999) writes a lively account of an ever-changing landscape of deserts, tropical forests, and creeping ice sheets—a land where elephants, camels, giant pigs, and other creatures appear, thrive, move on, or become extinct. He divides his drama into five acts, the first spanning the period from 66 to 59 million years ago. His story opens just before an asteroid smashes into Earth near the Yucatán Peninsula, ending the age of the dinosaurs and launching the rise of large mammals. In act two, from 57 to 33 million years ago, the climate warms, land bridges to Europe and Asia appear and disappear, and animals from North America invade Europe. Act three covers the period from 32 million to 13,000 years ago, a time of wild fluctuations in climate and dramatic changes in the continent’s plant and animal life. Act four begins with the migration of humans from Asia and the disappearance of its largest land mammals and ends with the arrival of Columbus. In the final act, European immigrants move in and expand across the continent, decimating the native human and animal populations, and replacing much of the native flora with planted crops. Flannery, who knows how to make paleontology, geology, climatology, and anthropology accessible to all, has even provided an unusually entertaining table of contents. In the final chapters, however, the knowledgeable ecological historian takes on a sharper tone. He is clearly dismayed by what he sees happening (“ruthless exploitation, greed, and senseless environmental destruction”) as he catalogs what we have done to our continent's natural resources.
Natural history par excellence.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-87113-789-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2001
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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