Only after the suspicious deaths of dozens of Osage Indians did the federal government step in to investigate, under the auspices of the cowboy lawman Tom White and the newly minted FBI.
Catapulted from being one of the nation's poorest communities to the world's per capita richest, the Osage became targets for racist politicians and criminals, who envied and despised the tribe's new wealth. Forced onto a reservation in an inhospitable corner of Oklahoma, the Osage Indian tribe became the unwitting benefactors of the vast, untapped oil riches beneath their new homes. Killers of the Flower Moon is the thrilling but deeply disturbing history of the Osage Indian murders of the 1920s. What were yours?ĭavid Grann’s absorbing Killers of the Flower Moon is much longer and less overtly political than On Tyranny, but it serves as a potent reminder that the US government has a long history of prizing greed over its citizens’ welfare - and that the FBI sometimes, sort of, does the right thing.
Perhaps like many of you, I’ve gravitated this year toward books that make me feel energized and, conversely, those that slow me down, because sometimes I want to get pumped up and enraged enough to fight the Man and other times I just want to understand him/her/they. We’re lucky to have writers of tremendous passion and insight, who have the temerity to ask difficult questions, and who craft astonishing, relevant stories out of world history and current events. Still, Ward, Hamid, and VanderMeer have their peers in the nonfiction world. Even Jeff VanderMeer’s sci-fi dystopia, Borne, probes the relationship between biotechnology and the natural world with an intensity and intelligence that makes you think twice about Elon Musk. There’s no podcast, cable news show, or periodical that could reveal the weight of racism or the flooded landscape of the Gulf better than Jesmyn Ward’s mind-blowing Sing, Unburied, Sing, or match the visceral depictions of refugees and escape in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West. I’ve needed the way that novelists reveal the architecture of human experience slowly, with more empathy and less sensationalism than America’s news cycle.
To be honest, I’ve read more fiction than nonfiction this year.
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