A strikingly rendered tale of the hard and lasting costs of courage.
A riveting story of maritime tragedies and a personal passage.
The Columbia River, writes Oregon-based journalist and former Rolling Stone contributing editor Sullivan, is “the most vital natural feature west of the Rocky Mountains.” He continues, “only the Missouri/Mississippi system exceeds it in annual runoff, and there are years when the Columbia’s flow is greater….The Columbia is unique among all rivers of the world…in the combination of its close proximity to the ocean and the tall mountain ranges that feed it all along the way there.” But it is the Columbia Bar, site of the river’s harrowing collision with the sea, that earned it the sobriquet “Graveyard of the Pacific.” In the fascinating introduction, the author chronicles the geological origins of the Columbia and its many tributaries and torturous route to the sea. Yet it is Sullivan’s gripping, vividly detailed accounts of nautical disasters at the Columbia Bar that make the book such an achievement for the three-time Pulitzer Prize nominee. The author digs deep to recount the most famous disasters at the Bar from the 18th to the 20th centuries, punctuating them with skillfully distilled biographies of notable figures of this period. The author’s personal story—from growing up with an abusive father to his 2021 attempt to cross the Bar by trimaran—courses through the book like an intermittent current. Well written and affecting, it risks becoming a mere framing device—until the compelling final chapter. Clearly, Sullivan wants to offer more than a dramatic historical account of shipwrecks and rescue operations, including his narrative of the hoped-for catharsis of a 69-year-old adventurer. In a touching coda about his friend and fellow sailor, their exploits, and their shared survival from lifelong traumas, the author finds a path to reconciliation and a reaffirmation of manhood that defies our caustic modern labels.
A strikingly rendered tale of the hard and lasting costs of courage.Pub Date: June 6, 2023
ISBN: 9780802162403
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
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
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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