A thrilling adventure story gracefully told.
An energetic examination of the maritime disaster that, surprisingly, cemented England’s claim to a colonial empire in the Americas.
In the early 1600s, with its plantation at Jamestown fractious and failing, the Virginia Company went all in, adopting a new charter to strengthen the colonial government, adding dozens of prominent names to the company council, raising additional funds and recruiting more colonists. In 1609, a hurricane wrecked the Sea Venture, sent by London investors to rescue the settlers, on a Bermuda reef. Previously, mariners had avoided the “Isle of Devils,” but the Virginia colonists discovered a paradise teeming with natural resources sufficient to refresh them and sustain a continuation of the mission to relieve Jamestown. Two boats built of the Sea Venture’s remains anchored at Cape Henry one year to the day after the expedition’s departure from Plymouth, England. The Sea Venture may not have actually “saved” Jamestown—Lord De La Warr’s later arrival with three supply ships deserves that distinction—but the news of her ordeal and triumph electrified England, excited new interest in the potential of Bermuda and firmly persuaded the nation that God’s hand guided the country’s stake in Virginia and its fight against Spanish dominion in the New World. Although the Sea Venture’s story and its seminal characters—George Somers, Thomas Smythe, William Strachey, Christopher Newport and Thomas Gates—have recently been featured in Benjamin Woolley’s Savage Kingdom (2007) and Kieran Doherty’s Sea Venture (2007), this treatment stands out for its artful placement and discussion of the episode between Jamestown’s suffering and squabbling and the Virginia Company’s desperate maneuvering to keep the colonial enterprise from completely foundering. Moreover, Glover (Early American History/Univ. of Tennessee; Southern Sons: Becoming Men in the New Nation, 2007, etc.) and Smith (Colonial American History/Univ. of Kentucky; Inside the Great House: Planter Family Life in Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake Society, 1981) use this tale of shipwreck and survival to convey the larger spirit of the age, a brew of enterprise, greed, godliness, hucksterism and self-advancement.
A thrilling adventure story gracefully told.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8654-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2008
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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