Good stuff for those who like their disaster-at-sea tales flavored with ideas.
Avast and arggh: another in a recent string of stories of things gone awry at sea—though with a smart spin that makes it better than most of the lot.
The Hornet, writes Jackson (Leavenworth Train, 2001, etc.), was a marvel of 19th-century clipper technology, capable of easy long-distance hauls from New York to San Francisco by way of Cape Horn. A thousand-odd miles off the Galapagos Islands on May 3, 1866, it caught fire, blazing “like a giant lamp, fueled by the 20,000 gallons of kerosene and 6,000 boxes of candles stored in her hold.” The captain, whom Mark Twain, no friend of bosses, characterized as “a New Englander of the best seagoing stock of the old capable times,” reluctantly ordered that the ship be abandoned and put out onto the open sea with crew and passengers in three dangerously overloaded boats. Immediately, writes Jackson, other perils loomed, and of many kinds, from passing marine predators to class warfare among officers and hands. The second was the more dangerous, for though the captain was a mild and fair man, his second officer was “partial to the colt, the single-coiled whip used to beat careless crewmen.” After only nine days at sea, Jackson writes, the mate’s crew was “poised for murder,” and that was before the real hard times set in, when the food and water began to run out and the doldrums-stalled, near-mutinous survivors set about contemplating which of their company they would dine on first. In all this Jackson has an improbably fine time, writing of the nutritional value of human flesh (not much, as it turns out, if it’s been starved of fat), the ecology of islands and ships, and the tangled class structure of Victorian America; his narrative sputters, and then only a little, only when the Hornet’s crew eventually makes land to be greeted by said Mark Twain, who would gain at least some of his early fame through the reports he filed of their grim adventure.
Good stuff for those who like their disaster-at-sea tales flavored with ideas.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-3037-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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 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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