Puts the human faces of dozens of miners their kinfolk on a grave mining disaster. (5 b&w photos, not seen)
Paperback true-crime author Olsen thoroughly combs the Sunshine Mine fire of 1972, a disaster that claimed 91 lives, for both the terrible facts and the human interest.
In a hardrock silver mine such as Sunshine, he writes, fire was an unlikely hazard. So when wisps of smoke began to work their way through the shafts, it didn’t alarm the miners, who thought it was probably a small flare-up that would soon dissipate. That would not be the case, Olsen reveals in this near blow-by-blow account. The smoke soon became thick as sludge and was followed by a sharp spike in carbon monoxide, a few good whiffs of which dropped the miners where they stood. This carefully braided story weaves profiles of the men—hard and bitten as nails, fiercely loyal, and, though wise to the ways of rock under intense pressure, not exactly cautionary by nature—into the chronicle of the disaster’s progress. An evacuation got half of the them to the surface, but many of their brethren suffocated in poisonous gas. Astonishingly, two men way down at 4,800 feet survived for a week after they found a clear patch with water. Nasty scapegoating of the men by the mine owners and the Bureau of Mines ignored the fact that the principal culprit was a flammable urethane foam already banned in England. Olsen’s narrative is brisk and often grim: “One crewman had to puncture a corpse with a pick to drain the gases and fluids so it could be put into the bag.” Wisely, however, he chooses not to whip the morbidity into a froth. He also details the consoling, positive fallout from the tragedy: the creation of the first federal agency solely responsible for mine safety and an array of new rules to preclude the obvious failures at play in the Sunshine incident.
Puts the human faces of dozens of miners their kinfolk on a grave mining disaster. (5 b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2005
ISBN: 0-609-61016-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
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
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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