A richly detailed, reflective account.
Throughout the course of one year, the author charts the transformation of a small patch of Canadian land.
When she was 9 years old in 1957, Beeaff fell in love with her family’s 16-acre tract along the Conestoga River in Southern Ontario, Canada. Now caring for the property with her husband, Beeaff shares the subtle shifts and major changes that occur there from season to season. The book comprises four parts, one for each season, which are then further separated into a handful of days per month. The chapters introduce a variety of different subjects: Historical (Paleo-Indians are believed to have lived in the area beginning from 9,000 B.C.E.); scientific (the end product of “sugaring” (aka maple syrup) has a sugar/water ratio of 2-to-1); and personal (Beeaff’s many childhood memories include one of her father rafting down the river to deliver piles of cut wood). But it’s the lush descriptions and observations of flora and fauna that form the heart of the book. Whether enjoying the silence of a moonlit night or reveling in the sightings of a local beaver (who they name Archibald Beaudelaire XXII, or “Beau” for short), Beeaff homes in on the minutiae of life in the forest by combining memoir-style musings with methodical observations of nature. The eloquent, expressive prose limns the beauty of the changing seasons as they unfold: “Early morning’s solid, ash-bottomed overcast holds the heaviness of winter.” While some narrative threads can wander (a lengthy discussion about the traditional meanings of various gemstones seems out of place, for example), the book as a whole hearkens back to a Walden-like simplicity that feels both refreshing and restorative. Beeaff’s testament to the Canadian woodlands through writing and color photographs reminds readers to step outside and take a breath.
A richly detailed, reflective account.Pub Date: July 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781647429324
Page Count: 276
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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