Not as gripping as Conquistador, but a richly textured account of the rogue, rebel and visionary whose discovery still...
An exciting, well-plotted excursion down the Amazon River with the early Spanish conquistador.
Levy follows his account of Hernán Cortés, Conquistador (2008), with this accessible new book, which follows Francisco Orellana’s accidental but monumental trip down the Amazon only a few years after Cortés. Orellana was second-in-command of an expedition led by Gonzalo Pizarro, one of the famous, swashbuckling Pizarro brothers, in pursuit of El Dorado in 1541. A royal cousin of the Pizarros, Orellana was just 30 years old when he was chosen to accompany Pizarro on a quest for gold and cinnamon in the unknown lands east of the Andes. Though the mouth of the Amazon had been discovered in 1500 by the former captain of Columbus’s Niña, no European had descended the world’s largest river. The two arrogant Spaniards set out with an astonishing 200 soldiers and horses, thousands of swine earmarked for food, llamas, war hounds and 4,000 Indian slave porters, and immediately ran into bad omens including freezing weather, an erupting volcano, Indian attacks and impassable forest. Pizarro had the brilliant idea to build a boat and make better progress, yet by December 1541 they had resolved to split up for survival. Orellana would advance with 60 men onboard the San Pedro and find food downriver, then return with provisions in 12 days, while Pizarro’s camp would follow slowly on foot. However, the Napo river soon joined the Amazon, and at terrific speed, so that there would be no way to return upstream—Orellana and crew were hurtling 2,500 miles toward the Atlantic Ocean. Thriving riverside populations awaited them (some friendly, some fierce), as well as mythical sightings of the Amazon women—all of which Levy ably captures in this knowledgeable work.
Not as gripping as Conquistador, but a richly textured account of the rogue, rebel and visionary whose discovery still resonates today.Pub Date: March 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-553-80750-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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