A jaw-dropping story kept on edge, along with the reader: exquisite and excruciating screw-turning. (b&w maps and...
The horrendous ordeal of 11 American seamen, shipwrecked on the Atlantic coast of North Africa and then sold into slavery, grippingly chronicled by adventure writer King (Harbors and High Seas, 1996, etc.).
The War of 1812 had just ended, and Captain James Riley was hungry to get back to work on the brig Commerce, sailing out of Connecticut to buy cheap and sell dear in the wake of the British wartime blockade. But strange weather and bad luck sent Riley’s ship onto the rocks of Atlantic Africa, then more bad luck put him and ten shipmates in the hands of nomads who took them into slavery. What happened over the next two months was so extraordinary that the narrative flies under its own steam, though King ably guides its progression and the reader’s absorption, using two firsthand accounts published after the event as his source material. The degree of privation the men suffered was so absurd it’s a wonder the nomads kept them at all, for their work value as slaves was scant. Yet there they are: sun-blasted, sand-blasted, wind-blasted, thighs chafed to bleeding ribbons from riding camels, feet shredded to the bone by sharp rocks, so thirsty that drinking urine was a comfort, so hungry they ate pieces of infected flesh that had been cut off the camels and the skin peeling off their own bodies. The men were split up, briefly reunited, then rudely separated; King plays these episodes like stringed instruments upon the reader’s taut occupation with the proceedings. A lifetime of misery was packed into two months, after which six of the seamen, led by the worthy Riley, managed to convince a trader to buy them for the bounty he will receive from the European consul in Morocco.
A jaw-dropping story kept on edge, along with the reader: exquisite and excruciating screw-turning. (b&w maps and illustrations)Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2004
ISBN: 0-316-83514-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003
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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