A wise, elegant study to add to the World War I archives.
An intriguing work of World War I research resurrects the little-known history of a massive German luxury liner that was confiscated and retooled for the American war effort.
In this lively look at the history of the Leviathan, once known as the SS Vaterland, the flagship of the Hamburg-American Line, Chicago Tribune editor Hernon (8.4, 1999, etc.), who was also an investigative reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, unearths a fresh aspect of America’s war effort. The ship, cruising into New York Harbor from Hamburg in late July 1914, was the largest vessel afloat at 950 feet—67 feet longer than the Titanic, which had perished disastrously at sea two years earlier. Due to that earlier disaster, the Vaterland was equipped with enough lifeboats for the 5,000-plus passengers and crew, both first-class and steerage. Yet the German crew of this behemoth was quickly halted in its efforts to prepare the vessel for a quick turnaround: war was declared in Europe in the beginning days of August, and along with other German ocean liners, the Vaterland would spend the next three years tied up in a Hoboken, New Jersey, pier. Using alternating points of view of some of the characters involved—e.g., Saturday Evening Post reporter Irvin Cobb and U.S. Navy officers and changing skippers—Hernon chronicles the tension of these early days when the U.S. was just declaring war on Germany and German ships lying in American harbors were being deliberately sabotaged before falling into American hands. Eventually, the Vaterland was refitted as the Leviathan and was packed with 10,000 American Expeditionary Force troops under the direction of Gen. John Pershing. The ship ferried them to the battlefields of France and back, through nightmarish submarine attacks, from December 1917 through the Armistice. Hernon also chronicles the contributions of decorated African-American troops.
A wise, elegant study to add to the World War I archives.Pub Date: June 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-243386-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 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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