Just the thing for Antarctic travelers, and a worthy addition to the little library devoted to the ever-deserving Shackleton.
A sometimes glacially paced but admirably complete account of the polar exploration that foregrounded Ernest Shackleton’s better-known voyage on the Endurance.
Riffenburgh (Scott Polar Research Institute) acknowledges that Shackleton himself has been far from forgotten, thanks in part to Caroline Alexander’s The Endurance (1999), and for good reason. His 1908 effort to find reach the South Pole, however, has been treated as something of a footnote, and Riffenburgh does a fine job of assembling the scattered records of the voyage from logs, diaries, and other accounts—including the dismissive reports of Robert Scott, who didn’t much care for Shackleton, and other gainsayers. Riffenburgh places Shackleton in the great tradition of late Victorian British imperialism, even if he was treated as less than a real English hero by virtue of his Irish background. As Riffenburgh resoundingly writes: “There were many distant places where all but Britons feared tread or sail, and Ernest Shackleton was going to seek them out.” Shackleton found them with a vengeance, leading an underfunded and ill-equipped expedition overland across huge expanses of Antarctic ice and over great mountain ranges, battling illness, privation, and occasional outbursts of dissent and frequent expressions of woe from his put-upon crew. (One recorded: “For three days we marched to a monotonous repetition of blasphemy every few steps from Adams, his favorite being ‘Jesus f . . . g God Almighty!’” The race to the pole also took on personal stakes as Shackleton vied to break Robert E. Peary’s claim of having reached the farthest latitude, which his crew did, having to scale an 11,000-foot range in the bargain. And more, Riffenburgh concludes: “Not only did Shackleton and his companions attain a phenomenal farthest south, members of the expedition also made the first ascent of Mount Erebus, reached the South Magnetic Pole, carried out an extensive scientific program, and brought back glory to the Empire, all with no loss of life.”
Just the thing for Antarctic travelers, and a worthy addition to the little library devoted to the ever-deserving Shackleton.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-58234-488-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
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 Yorker staff 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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