Written with authority and zeal, this rich narrative is popular history at its best.
A harrowing history of the one-armed Civil War hero’s 1869 expedition down the Colorado River that focuses on the dangers involved in the momentous journey rather than on Powell’s political views.
Dolnick (Madness on the Couch, 1998) animates the perilous adventure in which Powell, a geology fanatic, and nine novices battled relentless rapids in spindly boats that their predecessors consider “the technical equivalent of walnut shells.” Drawing on diaries, Dolnick lets the amateur sailors speak for themselves, allowing an array of colorful personalities to emerge. Powell yearned to put the western US on the map and observe the geology of the Colorado River region. After 80 miles, however, the scientific exploration turned into a hair-raising survival test—when rapids smashed one boat to pieces and destroyed a third of the provisions. Spoiling food and the inhospitable conditions of the Great Basin Desert—sandstorms, monsoons, scarcity of game—posed new challenges. Fearful that he would lose another boat, Powell often demanded his less cautious companions line the boats down the side of the rapids, or carry them through the rocks along the shoreline. As Powell’s companions tell it, this drudgery was “all bad. . . . We all have horrible scars from our knees downwards to remind us of the days when we made portages.” Dolnick uses interviews with contemporary boaters and the Colorado’s sanguinary history of tourist accidents to emphasize the alarming odds the ragtag expedition faced. On land, tension between rock-obsessed Powell and his cantankerous crew brewed as Powell wasted days searching for fossils while his men despaired of reaching civilization before they starved. After four members decamped, the remaining explorers, with only nine days’ worth of musty flour left, miraculously reached their destination and ended the era of western exploration.
Written with authority and zeal, this rich narrative is popular history at its best.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-019619-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
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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