A riveting epic that memorably honors the heroes, both human and canine, who pushed themselves to the limit to save others.
Two cousins debut with an eloquent account of the famous 1925 dash by dog-sled teams to bring diphtheria serum to Nome, Alaska.
Freelance journalist Laney Salisbury and former publishing executive Gay Salisbury seamlessly blend Alaska’s early history and an anthropological survey of Eskimo traditions with a page-turning chronicle of the race to Nome. Once the center of a gold rush, by December 1924 it was a small town on the Bering Sea shut off from the rest of the territory, its only harbor icebound from November until spring, its only line of communication the trails the dog teams used. In December, Dr. Curtis Welch noted an increasing number of illnesses among the local native population as well as the town’s children, suspected diphtheria, and became increasingly alarmed. New supplies of serum had failed to arrive, and he had no laboratory facilities. As children died, and the number of infected rose in late January 1925, Nome’s mayor placed the town under quarantine and issued a nationwide plea for serum. It was located in Anchorage and taken by rail to Nenana, where the first dog team picked it up and began the race across frozen seas and up icy mountains to complete the 674-mile journey to Nome. Both the weather and the terrain proved hostile and capricious: ice floes suddenly broke apart, blizzards blew up, and temperatures dropped. The writers vividly describe the race against time and nature, which attracted national attention, and provide well-rounded portraits of the team leaders and their dogs, especially Balto, the leader of the team that reached Nome first. His statue stands in New York’s Central Park.
A riveting epic that memorably honors the heroes, both human and canine, who pushed themselves to the limit to save others.Pub Date: June 9, 2003
ISBN: 0-393-01962-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 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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