Bizarre tales of survival and doom: a plum for beach-chair readers who like to raise surrounding eyebrows.
Recollections of tragedy and trauma from a 1938 storm of singular ferocity that took the northeastern U.S. totally by surprise.
Journalist Burns (Stepmotherhood, 1986) takes a little time getting to the story’s crux. Imagine the worst tropical storm you’ve ever been in, seen on TV,or heard about. Now imagine the same hurricane with no weather satellite pictures, no television, no cell phones, no rescue helicopters, no localized severe-weather radio warnings and no Interstate highways to funnel out evacuees even if there had been. The author diligently mines and layers anecdotes to build a picture of Long Island and New England seacoast communities in a balmy late September, trying to wring just a few more vacation days away from the still palpable drag of the Great Depression and the even more threatening clouds of war in Europe. With little more than the vague “gale warnings” most locals associated with a typical nor’easter, it hit: a great elongated eye clawing north at an unparalleled 60 miles per hour over open ocean, with winds gusting to more than 180 m.p.h. Pounding waves associated with a storm surge averaging higher than 20 feet would register on a seismograph 5,000 miles away in Alaska. The fact that 700 or more lives were lost is appalling enough, but the role played by lack of information is almost incomprehensible today. Fragile telephone systems became the first line of infrastructure blasted away. So as the eye of what would later be known simply as the Great Hurricane of 1938 (naming conventions were yet to come) advanced on the coastlines of Connecticut and Rhode Island, no one there even knew that it had devastated most of eastern Long Island two hours before. Weddings, picnics, even some fishing trips would proceed without hesitation, yet shoppers would later drown in downtown Providence.
Bizarre tales of survival and doom: a plum for beach-chair readers who like to raise surrounding eyebrows.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-87113-893-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
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 Yorkerstaff 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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