Saturday, May 27, 2017

Great Sports Illustrated writing by Jenkins & Ballard

There's been a few different stories from Sports Illustrated in recent months that have struck me as particularly outstanding, with one from Lee Jenkins on a high school baseball phenom and two basketball-related pieces from Chris Ballard.

The Jenkins feature was "Hunter Greene is the star baseball needs" on the Sherman Oaks, CA pitcher / shortstop and a cover story, with the most recent previous SI high school athlete cover subjects Jabari Parker, Sebastian Telfair, Bryce Harper, and LeBron James. I'm often captivated by writing about potential future stars and recall the Harper piece by Tom Verducci back in 2009.

The older of the two Ballard stories to note here was "'You Can't Give In': Monty Williams On Life After Tragedy" about the NBA coach whose wife died unexpectedly. The story of how Williams and their five kids dealt with the grief and have carried on with their lives in honor of Ingrid is a great one well told by Ballard.

The final piece to note here was the cover story from the latest SI issue, with Ballard writing "Steve Kerr's Absence: The True Test Of A Leader" about the Warriors' head coach. It's great stuff on Kerr, including him being a grinder, over-communicator, someone who works with people based on how they are and what they'll respond to, doesn't take himself too seriously, and is joyful and just plain likable. Ballard wrote a really compelling story and also interesting from it was mention of how Kerr last season brought into a pair of practices Dacher Keltner, a social psychologist from Cal who studies verbal cues and the dynamics of compassion, and Ballard notes as having played a role in how the filmmakers of Pixar's Inside Out looked at emotion.

Monday, May 22, 2017

The Lost City of the Monkey God by Douglas Preston

The Lost City of the Monkey God by Douglas Preston was a solid read about the search for the ruins of an undiscovered city deep in the La Mosquitia region of Honduras.

Preston provides the history of this remote Amazonian rainforest region and archaeologists being interested in it and exploration done there all the way back to the 1930s, with legends out of that about the Cuidad Blanca, or White City.

Recounted in the book is how he as a writer got invited to join a 2012 aerial mapping trip of a specific area within La Mosquita that was seen as a promising location of the city's ruins. The mapping effort was led by filmmaker Steve Elkins and utilized lidar, a technology that works like radar, bouncing lasers off the ground, in this case from a Cessna airline, to determine distance and find the existence of geologic features as well as structures. This aerial mapping appeared to confirm the existence of the city ruins and their location and then in 2015, Preston also was part of a ground expedition to survey the area, with Chris Fisher leading a team of archaeologists and financing provided in large part by filmmaker Bill Benenson.

The time on the ground in the jungle was recounted as quite dangerous, with the area containing poisonous snakes like the fer-de-lance, jaguars, disease, and drug cartel activity. Ruins were found and even from that, little known about the people who lived there, other than they weren't Mayan and their society basically vanished around 1,500 AD, the time the Spanish came to the Americas, bringing Europeans diseases the locals had never been exposed to and which decimated populations, even those that never came in direct contact with European explorers. Preston notes how it's said that a third of the native population across Hispaniola and the Caribbean died between 1494 and 1496 and it appears that whoever lived within this city abandoned it.

The book wraps up with how some members of the expedition team after returning home began to show as having acquired the tropical disease leishmaniasis, a third world one that as such has received scant attention and funding, but is noted in the book as being part of a group of third world diseases coming to the first world as a result of climate change. The Lost City of the Monkey God was somewhat sobering with this mention of how quickly native populations were decimated by disease, and the tale of disease troubles modern day expedition members faced upon their return, but it's also a great adventure tale told well by Preston.

Tuesday, May 16, 2017

Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann

Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann was a really good book with the subtitle The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. The book is split into three sections, with the first the story of the Osage Indians and deaths of many in and around the 1920s, the second on the FBI pursuit of the killers, and third an important postscript on the murders close to 100 years later.

Grann writes early in the book of how the Osage were considered the wealthiest people in the world per capita due to royalties from oil drilling on their Oklahoma land, which they had purchased after being pushed there by the federal government in the 1870s. Individual members of the tribe had a headright, or share in the mineral trust, and collectively they received in 1923 more than $30M, the equivalent of $400M today.

With the wealth of the Osage, there was a systematic exploitation of them, both by whites grossly overcharging for goods and services and the government denying many Osage of the ability to control their money. The Office of Indian Affairs could determine whether a particular member of the tribe capable of handling their funds, and if not, guardians, usually prominent whites, would do it. Full blooded Osage Indians were almost always declared unfit to handle their money and had guardians appointed over them, which led to the murders of tribe members as guardians would consolidate power over the headright funds and get at the money.

The book begins with the murder by gunshot of Anna Burkhart in May 1921, notes how her sister Minnie had died from an unexplained illness three years prior, and not long after Anna’s death, mother Lizzie, and other sister Rita died, with Rita’s death coming from her house being blown up along with husband Bill Smith and their servant Nettie Brookshire. There were other murders as well around this time, with the methods including additional fatal gunshots, poisonings, and someone found dead after being thrown from a train. Following the house bombing, the Osage saw that local law enforcement seemed uninterested, if not complicit, in the crimes and urged the Federal Government to investigate what would become known as the Osage Reign of Terror.

The second section of the book details FBI involvement in the case, coinciding with the rise of J. Edgar Hoover, who was newly in charge of the Bureau of Investigation in 1925 and dispatched agent Tom White to investigate the murders. White and his team built a case for the house bombing against Mollie Burkhart’s husband, a white man named Ernest Burkhart, and his uncle, the prominent cattleman William K. Hale, seen as a friend of the Osage and well connected politically. Headrights got passed along by inheritance and Mollie's family being targeted meant everything was getting passed to her, with the money then controlled by Ernest and Hale.

While the first parts of the book interesting, the third takes it to a different level with how it reveals the government stating the murders solved, declaring victory, and moving on, when killers very much remained free. The section switches to first person writing by Grann, with him finding the murder of W.W. Vaughn likely committed by H.G. Burt, a businessman and confidant of Hale's. Additionally, government accounts of the Reign of Terror have it from 1921 to 1926 and all about Hale, but Grann found cases of Osage being killed for their headrights as early as 1918 and late as 1931, while Hale in jail. The Bureau estimated 24 murders, but the number likely much higher and the death rates were particular high for Osage who had guardians in control of the wealth of more than one in the tribe. It was a much bigger story than Hoover wanted told and the book's ending includes a quote from an elderly current Osage with "this land is saturated with blood."