Entertaining fireworks during the early days of flight.
A dramatic account of the massive 1919 cross-country air race, “the likes of which the world had never seen.”
In his debut, journalist Lancaster, a former Washington Post foreign correspondent, focuses on Army Gen. Billy Mitchell (1879-1936), who rose to command all air combat units in France during World War I and returned after the armistice to fiercely advocate for an expansion of America’s air power, a campaign that included organizing the great air race. At the time, airplanes were built with fragile wood and fabric, with open cockpits, unreliable engines with a range of 150-200 miles, no navigation aids more complex than a compass, and no parachutes. The U.S. airmail service was already a year old, despite a litany of disasters, and air races attracted large crowds and media attention. Only months before the big race, Mitchell had overseen a widely publicized competition in which 40 planes flew between New York and Toronto. With only a few weeks’ notice, he announced a round-trip race across the continent, leaving from either Long Island or San Francisco. There followed a mass of publicity and torrent of applicants, mostly ex- or current airmen. In this well-researched text, Lancaster delivers an expert description of the planes (mostly ex–WWI fighters) and biographies of the volunteers, and he devotes more than half of the story to the precise details of the race. Primitive aircraft and unreliable weather forecasting, combined with the flyers’ fierce competitiveness, proved a deadly combination. More than 50 planes crashed; some were repaired and flew on, but nine men died. The media praised the courage of the participants, and while writers claimed that it sped technical and commercial progress, Lancaster quotes some skeptics. He agrees that it marked the beginning of a new age and ends with a lively, occasionally gruesome history of early cross-country airmail and the not terribly pertinent but still intriguing story of Mitchell’s eventual flameout.
Entertaining fireworks during the early days of flight.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63149-637-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
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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