Necessary reading for students of California history and a model for place-based historical studies to come.
Masterful explorations of the Golden State by a leading historian of the American West.
White (American History/Stanford Univ.; The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896, 2017, etc.) teams with his photographer son, Jesse, in a fruitful, highly illuminating collaboration born of a dare to shape a historical text out of an assemblage of images. The result is, the author admits, incomplete: The story of Watts is absent, that of Silicon Valley hinted at, and “the state’s frequently peculiar politics sometimes enter the story, but more often do not.” Nonetheless, White dismantles and builds at the same time, interrogating the well-worn story of Sir Francis Drake’s landing at Point Reyes and complicating the subsequent enshrinement by Episcopalian monument builders with the fact that their hero was a pirate, which “made the celebration of his religious faith incongruous.” The author returns to Point Reyes to recount the working-class immigrants who made a living there, a narrative of Japanese and Italian households that picnicked together but were subjected to different fates when World War II arrived; that narrative is braced by historical photographs and Jesse’s sweeping landscapes. White’s principal interest lies precisely with those working people who made California, among them the Native peoples who labored in the irrigated orchards and vegetable beds outside the main mission compound at San Fernando: “Gardens were for contemplation and relaxation; in the huertas, people worked.” At Point Reyes again, he examines the lives of the men, women, and children at the “alphabet ranches” (named D Ranch, F Ranch, and so on) who worked as tenants in places where the ranchers hoped “that good years would outnumber bad.” Sometimes they were right, a fact that has kept people coming to California in endless numbers for generations. White gives them voice, writing thoughtfully of the many cultures and ethnicities that have contributed to building the state.
Necessary reading for students of California history and a model for place-based historical studies to come.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-393-24306-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
