Presser’s detailed account provides a sense of authority to a story too bizarre to be anything but true.
A South Pacific tale of “tribalism, trauma, psychopathy, paranoia, and survival in the bleakest of conditions.”
After numerous books and films, the story of the 1789 mutiny on the British navy ship Bountyis fairly well known—the Hollywood version, at least. Fletcher Christian led a group to overthrow the tyrannical Capt. Bligh and then sail into the South Pacific sunset. However, according to this meticulously researched book, that was far from the end of the adventure. The mutiny was just the prologue, writes Presser, a travel writer who has visited more than 130 countries; the real story involves what happened to the mutineers later. Eventually, they reached the daunting Pitcairn Island, one of the most remote islands in the world. Leading a mixed bag of sailors, Tahitian men, and Tahitian women that the Englishmen had taken as partners, Fletcher pronounced the island perfect for a self-sustaining, peaceful, and democratic minisociety. Of course, all did not go as planned. Some of the ex-sailors wanted a Caribbean-style feudal system and treated the Tahitian men as slaves and the women as pieces of a rotating harem. Inevitably, there was an outbreak of violence, although after several cycles of murder and retribution, it burned itself out and a measure of peace was reestablished. Eighteen years after the initial landing, another ship chanced upon them. By that time, there was a growing population of offspring—so many that some eventually moved to another island. Presser’s extensive research included “hundreds of resources from old captains’ logs to newspaper clippings to the other tomes penned by writers who have similarly descended down into the darkness of Pitcairn. He also lived there for several months, and he found the people to be tough yet also gossipy and obsessive. Armchair adventurers will appreciate the author’s sharp and sympathetic eye, showing us the mechanics of a truly remote civilization.
Presser’s detailed account provides a sense of authority to a story too bizarre to be anything but true.Pub Date: March 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5417-5857-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
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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