A well-told tale of naval exploits in which gold is the MacGuffin.
The history of the sinking of a trans-Atlantic liner and the hunt for the 43 tons of gold it was carrying.
Early in 1917, the Laurentic, an elegant passenger ship refitted for wartime service, set sail from Northern Ireland bound for the United States, laden with gold ingots to finance Britain’s effort in World War I. Before the vessel left the Irish coast, it was sunk by a German submarine as part of Germany’s U-boat campaign. Along with details on submarine development, Williams (Seventeen Fathoms Deep: The Saga of the Submarine S-4 Disaster, 2015) writes like a truly sober sailor, with a vocabulary that includes “coaming,” “paravane,” and “splicing the mainbrace.” The author graphically recounts the sinking and provides a biography of Guybon Damant (1881-1963), the naval officer who undertook the salvage for the Admiralty. Though Damant loved the task, it was not a simple assignment. Clad in inflated canvas diving dress, heavy boots, and globular metal helmets and tethered by lifelines and air pipes that tended to tangle, divers were subject to the bends. Damant became an expert in the practice of recompression. The wreck of the Laurentic was compressed accordionlike and shifting in rough water. Tons of plating and bulkheads required exploding and removal. There was also Admiralty red tape, shifting sand, silt, and crumbling wreckage. Winter weather was bad, and diving was restricted to summers. The effort took seven years, but, eventually, Damant’s group was successful. After he retired, he became a commander of the British Empire. Ultimately, the crew recovered 3,186 of the 3,211 ingots that went down with the ship. Others have since searched, unsuccessfully, and there are still a few bars of gold deep down in what is now an Irish historic site.
A well-told tale of naval exploits in which gold is the MacGuffin.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61373-758-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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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