by Dwight Garner
If you taught the artificial brains of supercomputers at IBM Research to write nonfiction prose, and if they got very good at it, they might compose a book like David Grann’s “Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI.”
This is not entirely a complaint. Grann’s new book, about how dozens of members of the Osage Indian nation in Oklahoma in the 1920s were shot, poisoned or blown to bits by rapacious whites who coveted the oil under their land, is close to impeccable. It’s confident, fluid in its dynamics, light on its feet.
What it lacks is the soulful, trippy, questing and offhandedly cerebral quality of his last and best-known book, “The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon” (2009). That volume is deservedly regarded as one of the prize nonfiction specimens of this century.
That was a book with a personality. It seemed to be written by someone who was, as Charles Lamb said of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, an archangel a little damaged. There was some strange junk in its cupboards.
“Killers of the Flower Moon” has cleaner lines, and it didn’t set its hooks in me in the same way. But the crime story it tells is appalling and stocked with authentic heroes and villains. It will make you cringe at man’s inhumanity to man.
About America’s native people, Saul Bellow wrote in a 1957 essay, “They have left their bones, their flints and pots, their place names and tribal names and little besides except a stain, seldom vivid, on the consciousness of their white successors.”
The best thing about Grann’s book is that it stares, hard, at that stain, and makes it vivid indeed.
"The Osage Indians Struck It Rich, Then Paid the Price" by Dwight Garner, from THE NEW YORK TIMES, April 12, 2017. Copyright © 2017 by The New York Times Company. All rights reserved. Used under license.
Question
Use the passage to answer the question.
Which statement best characterizes the argument that Killers of the Flower Moon’s writing is “impeccable” but lacks “personality”?
(1 point)
Responses
The evidence is ineffective because the reviewer does not include enough biographical information about the author.
The evidence is ineffective because the reviewer does not include enough biographical information about the author.
The evidence is effective because the reviewer includes a direct quotation from a reliable expert.
The evidence is effective because the reviewer includes a direct quotation from a reliable expert.
The evidence is effective because the reviewer includes a succinct and compelling plot summary.
The evidence is effective because the reviewer includes a succinct and compelling plot summary.
The evidence is ineffective because the reviewer does not include direct quotations from the book.
The evidence is ineffective because the reviewer does not include direct quotations from the book.
1 answer
The statement that best characterizes the argument is:
The evidence is effective because the reviewer includes a succinct and compelling plot summary.
This is because the reviewer provides a clear summary of the book’s content and themes, which helps to illustrate the argument about its impeccable writing while lacking the personality found in Grann’s earlier work.
