The author’s solid research and use of newly available material exposes the truth of the Potato Famine, the barbaric...
Miles (Environmental Writing/Unity Coll.) builds her story around the Jeanie Johnston, the only ship fleeing the Irish Potato Famine with a 100 percent survival rate in its many Atlantic crossings.
The author does not spare the British Empire in the death of over 1 million Irish. They may not have murdered them, but the export of grain out of the starving country, evictions, minimal relief, a providential attitude and the death traps that were called “coffin ships” were the direct result of British colonial policy. Miles shows the flicker of hope in the nightmare of emigration that was the Jeanie Johnston. Her captain, James Attridge, his crew and the ship’s physician, Richard Blennerhassett, guided the purpose-built ship across the Atlantic Ocean determined to prevent cholera and typhus from decimating their passengers. They insisted on hygienic living, frequent walks on deck for passengers and weekly airing of bedding. The author’s vivid description of the barbaric crowding on other ships during the two-month trip will make many readers wonder how anyone survived. The food, less than a pound of oatmeal per day, was barely enough to sustain life. Even those who survived the crossing met desperate conditions when they finally reached their destination, including a lack of work, quarantine and more disease. Miles provides a host of intriguing profiles of the many passengers—including Nicholas Reilly, who was born aboard the ship—as they left their home behind to seek a new life.
The author’s solid research and use of newly available material exposes the truth of the Potato Famine, the barbaric policies that exacerbated it and the incredible will of the Irish people.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-1013-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2012
HISTORY | MODERN | UNITED STATES | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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