A wonderful look into the beginnings of Australia and the remarkable strength of the survivors of these dangerous voyages.
A British historian recounts the links between the founding of the British penal colony in Australia and the mutiny on the Bounty.
Preston (A Higher Form of Killing: Six Weeks in World War I That Forever Changed the Nature of Warfare, 2015, etc.) narrates the story of three remarkable open-boat journeys. The first was occasioned by mutiny, the second by escaped convicts, and the third by shipwreck. William Bligh (1754-1817) was part of two other mutinies: the great naval mutiny in 1797, when aggrieved sailors removed their captains from a number of ships on Britain’s coast, and his deposition by subordinates as governor of the Australian penal colony in 1808. The story of Bligh’s 3,600-mile open-boat journey to Timor in 1789 is well-known, but two others made similar voyages not long after. Almost two years to the day, nine convicts, escapees from Port Jackson penal colony in Botany Bay, landed at the same place on Timor. Their 10-week trek covered more than 3,200 nautical miles of hazardous seas. The third trek was led by the captain of Pandora, a ship sent to find and arrest the Bounty mutineers. She sank in the Great Barrier Reef, but dozens of the ship’s company, as well as 10 captured mutineers, survived the trip to Timor in four boats. Ultimately, this is a book about survival, and the author engagingly recounts the nearly impossible task of trying to establish a penal colony with few supplies and poor agricultural conditions. Preston shines in her description of the true nature of Capt. Bligh, who skimmed, cheated, cut rations, and stole supplies. Still, it seems greed was the least of his faults. He also had an explosive temper and was uncommonly harsh, abusive, and even tyrannical. His manner was consistently aggressive, and he seemed to completely lack empathy, intuition, or insight.
A wonderful look into the beginnings of Australia and the remarkable strength of the survivors of these dangerous voyages.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63286-610-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
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
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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