The tale of how Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen triumphed in the race to the South Pole, beating British contender Robert Scott by only two weeks, still grips our imagination 100 years later.
It is a heroic saga of human endurance stretched to the limit in a continent so harsh that no indigenous inhabitants lived there, made tragic by Scott's death on the ice. Hooper (The Ferocious Summer: Palmer's Penguin's and the Warming of Antarctica, 2007, etc.) focuses on six members of Scott's team who were given the task of exploring the glacial area to the east while Scott's team made a direct approach to the Pole. Their adventures and the hardships they endured is, writes the author, “one of the great tales of survival.” Although they landed with adequate supplies near a pre-existing hut, which served as their home base, the expectation was that they would be picked up by the expedition's ship the following summer. When the ship failed to return for them as planned, their supplies ran out and their situation begin to deteriorate. To survive, they had to find a way, on foot, through the ice, and reconnect with Scott's backup team. While writing the book, Hooper had access to the scientific notebooks, diaries and letters of members of the expedition, archived at Cambridge University, and she is familiar with her subject, having spent three summers living in Antarctica as a writer chosen to record the work of the Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions and the U.S. National Science Polar Program. She vividly describes the glacial terrain they traveled, the ravages of the weather and the flora and fauna of the region. A grand story of six brave men who literally and figuratively pulled together in their race for survival.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-58243-762-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
