A lively narrative slickly done: nothing wrong with that, but intelligent readers who like their history straight up may...
The creator of the immensely popular series of marine and underwater adventures starring Dirk Pitt (Valhalla Rising, 2001, etc.) returns with a sequel to his nonfiction Sea Hunters (1996).
Cussler’s flair as a novelist often bleeds into his real-life adventures with an ad hoc group of companions variously skilled in the arts of shipwreck hunting that now bears the imprimatur of National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA), borrowed from the fictional entity of the same name. This is not to imply any distortion of key facts (more on that later), but it does allow Cussler and NUMA cohort Dirgo to weave corking good stories around episodes that are often equal parts adventure and misadventure. NUMA’s mission is to locate wrecks, not salvage them; nobody dives down, for instance, to tangle with a giant squid over a chest of doubloons. And here, towing a Magnetic Anomaly Detector over the seabed or riverbed to pinpoint where a wreck is not (in the case of Lieutenant John F. Kennedy’s PT 109) easily passes for a bona fide adventure. Threats of weather and wave occasionally loom, but more often botched plane reservations or cafes that don’t stock the right brand of hot sauce are the drolly rendered impedimenta. Exhaustive research on intended targets like the “ghost ship” Mary Celeste, the Civil War vessel U.S.S. Mississippi, and particularly the siege of Charleston, which cost the Union so dearly in ironclads and their crews, is genuinely illuminating, and the events often fascinatingly told. Cussler, however, belongs to that genre of writers who are somehow informed by the Almighty as to the precise final words, thoughts, and actions of those about to succumb (in this case to maritime disasters), so that hypothesis is not an issue to be flagged.
A lively narrative slickly done: nothing wrong with that, but intelligent readers who like their history straight up may find it simply annoying.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2002
ISBN: 0-399-14925-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
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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