St. Clair is an affectionate, informed narrator, placing personal portraits within the larger context of the era.
A transcontinental competition becomes a vehicle to explore a broader story.
Even from the distance of more than a century, the 1907 automobile race from Peking to Paris seems not only eccentric, but positively harebrained. St. Clair, the author of The Golden Thread and The Secret Lives of Color, plunges into the task of narrating the tale with enthusiasm, discovering new primary sources and finding fresh perspectives. The incredible length of the race gives the author the chance to explore the sociopolitical issues of the time, as the Chinese and Russian empires tottered and new technologies gathered pace. Sponsored by the French newspaper Le Matin, the race garnered worldwide attention, thanks largely to the dispatches sent from the race participants. In fact, the route was designed to intersect with telegraph stations. Five vehicles started the race; amazingly, four finished. The fifth, while generously classed as an automobile by the race organizers, was more like a three-wheeled motorcycle; it sputtered out in “the parched vastness” of the Gobi Desert. The roads across China and Russia were primitive or even nonexistent. Supplies of gas and food were pre-positioned at various locations, but some of the participants could not locate them. Sometimes, the racers helped each other through scrapes and breakdowns, and sometimes the spirit of unscrupulous competition prevailed. St. Clair prunes away the mythology and nationalistic propaganda that has grown up around the race, on the basis that the real story does not need embellishment. It is entirely the right approach, and the book will appeal not only to car and sports aficionados, but to general readers interested in how the automobile, global communications, and media marketing combined to become the defining traits of the modern world.
St. Clair is an affectionate, informed narrator, placing personal portraits within the larger context of the era.Pub Date: May 14, 2024
ISBN: 9781324094913
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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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