A caustic, subjective sociological case study.
Clean energy meets serious opposition in this partisan account of an effort to harvest wind power off the coast of Nantucket.
Windmills placed in the waters around Cape Cod might seem like a good way to supplement the power supply for New England, an area with high energy costs as well as a history of waters poisoned by petroleum spills and air polluted by smokestacks. But when entrepreneur Jim Gordon proposed to build a field of wind turbines five miles from the shores of Nantucket and its ritzy summer homes, NIMBY fury burst forth. It would be bad for the birds and the whales, said local yachtsmen, unsupported by facts. The core objection of celebrity opponents like historian David McCullough was that Cape Wind would be “visual pollution,” an unwelcome blot on the seascapes enjoyed from their verandahs or boats. Investigative journalist Williams and Providence Journal editor Whitcomb rake some fine muck to conclude that, “money and corrupt government officials are hijacking our nation’s economic and environmental future.” From the start, their sympathies are clear: The heroes striving to build Cape Wind talk straight; the bad guys trying to block it rave and fulminate. Although the authors conscientiously explain the technology involved, their main focus is on the maelstrom of money and politics in which an entrenched elite wielded undue power against a clean energy source. The battle over Cape Wind was fought through town meetings, state government, courtrooms and across party lines in the U.S. Congress; Governor Mitt Romney and some of the Kennedy clan were among the major players. The book ends, but the story is not over. More than five years after they were first proposed, the Cape Wind turbines are not yet built, but neither is the project dead.
A caustic, subjective sociological case study.Pub Date: May 7, 2007
ISBN: 1-58648-397-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2007
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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