Expect a tweetstorm as Maddow’s indictment of a corrupt industry finds readers—and it deserves many.
Maddow (Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power, 2012) examines the disconcertingly disproportionate influence of big oil on world affairs.
The author may be a popular, progressive news-and-commentary anchor on MSNBC, but it’s not to be forgotten that she holds a doctorate in politics from Oxford and seems to devour whole libraries of data before breakfast each day. In her second book, she takes on the oil oligarchy, beginning with, fittingly, an opening: the first of a Russian-owned chain of gas stations in New York City in 2003, its celebrity highlight Vladimir Putin, accompanied by Sen. Chuck Schumer. Putin had not been in power long, though long enough that the U.S. ambassador to Russia “had already warned of the risk that [he] would evolve into an autocrat who monopolized control of government and the economy behind the window dressing of democratic institutions.” From there, Maddow goes on to develop a densely argued exercise in connecting dots: A corrupt Russia—one in which, for example, the builders of the Olympic Village in Sochi skimmed off upward of $30 billion—hitched its wagon to a moribund petro-economy, one that could not survive with the sanctions imposed on it by the Obama administration. This set in motion the whole chain of events now playing out, including Russian tampering in the 2016 election and the not-coincidental haste of the Trump administration to lift those sanctions the moment it entered power. There are many stops along the way. Maddow looks, for example, at the seismic effects of fracking in Oklahoma, a petroleum-extraction technology that, as one voter remarked, afforded “an issue that will turn a red state blue.” Updating Daniel Yergin’s The Prize with three decades’ worth of material, Maddow concludes that big oil can and will do nothing to regulate itself and argues that “containment is the small-c conservative answer” to the problem of “the industry’s reliance on corruption and capture."
Expect a tweetstorm as Maddow’s indictment of a corrupt industry finds readers—and it deserves many.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-57547-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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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