"The Osage Indians Struck It Rich, Paid the Price"

Question

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 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 quotation from the passage contains the reviewer’s main argument about Killers of the Flower Moon?

(1 point)
Responses

“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.’”
“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.’”

“That volume is deservedly regarded as one of the prize nonfiction specimens of this century.”
“That volume is deservedly regarded as one of the prize nonfiction specimens of this century.”

“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.”
“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.”

“It seemed to be written by someone who was, as Charles Lamb said of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, an archangel a little damaged.”

Answer 1

The quotation that contains the reviewer’s main argument about "Killers of the Flower Moon" is:

“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.”

This statement highlights both the quality of the storytelling and the powerful impact of the subject matter, which is central to the reviewer's assessment of the book.