A gripping David-vs.-Goliath story that remains suspenseful to the final page.
A novelist and trial attorney tells the true story of North Carolina landowners who fought for justice from a multinational corporation over the deleterious practices of large-scale hog farming.
Addison begins his absorbing and inspiring narrative with a group of landowners, mostly Black, who worked small plots of farmland in eastern North Carolina. Then neighboring farmers began to build massive hog farms, contracting to raise hogs owned by firms acquired by the Chinese-owned behemoth Smithfield Foods, “the kingpin of East Coast meatpacking.” In this page-turning exposé of corporate malfeasance, the author paints a vivid picture of four counties, 5 million hogs, and a hog density “higher than any other place on earth.” The animals are raised in abysmal conditions on farms that disperse massive amounts of noxious waste into the water (through leaky waste lagoons) and air (waste sprayed onto empty fields). The toxin- and bacteria-laden waste and the unbearable smell penetrate everything. Meanwhile, the “hog barons” live far from the stench. After they had exhausted regulatory and political remedies, the landowners retained a small but potent law firm to sue for damages, setting in motion a lengthy legal battle pitting small landowners and their lawyers, scientists, and activists against industry executives, their attorneys, fearful locals, and politicians in Smithfield’s pocket. Though Addison tints his portrayals of the plaintiffs and their lawyers with a heroic glow, he makes a persuasive case that their advocacy took enormous courage. The atmosphere of threat is palpable throughout the book, as the lawyers and their clients are surveilled and threatened. The author clearly explains the legal strategies involved, and he has a good feel for Southern society and the “historical, entrenched, pestilential prejudice” that still warps it. The book reads like a thriller (John Grisham provides the foreword) and strikingly underscores why American courts are so often a last resort for those wronged by structural economic injustice.
A gripping David-vs.-Goliath story that remains suspenseful to the final page.Pub Date: June 7, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-32082-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 8, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
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 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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