A hell of a yarn.
A page-turning history of an infamous mutiny.
On Dec. 14, 1842, the U.S.S. Somers sailed into New York Harbor minus three of her crew, hanged for attempted mutiny. The ringleader was the son of the secretary of war. Drawing on copious contemporary sources, Snow, author of Disney’s Land and I Invented the Modern Age, quickly sets the scene before diving into his characters. The man behind the mutiny plot was Acting Midshipman Philip Spencer, a pirate-obsessed, 18-year-old ne’er-do-well whose distinguished father gave up on educating him after a failed college career and consigned him to a naval career. “Surely,” writes Snow, “the confinement of shipboard life would offer [Spencer] little chance to run off into a career of depravity.” In fact, it took him less than a year to be disciplined off two ships before boarding the Somers for one last chance. The ship’s commander, Alexander Slidell Mackenzie, was a harsh disciplinarian with an “enthusiasm for the lash” whose writing displayed “a relish for violence that approache[d] the prurient.” The shipboard drama drew national media attention once the Somers returned to port, as did the ensuing legal proceedings: first an inquiry, then a court-martial. Snow pieces together the events from trial transcripts (including the highly irregular kangaroo court that led to the hangings), contemporary accounts, and retrospective recollections. The result is consistently compelling, despite the author’s reliance on sources replete with what he characterizes as “nineteenth-century treacle.” Much of the book’s appeal derives from Snow’s tart commentary on those sources: “It is hard,” he writes, “to find a glint of humor anywhere….Of the lighthearted touch he had little; of self-deprecation, none, ever.” The result of the court-martial was acquittal, but the affair became “a forbidden topic in naval circles,” resurfacing periodically for re-examination; readers of this iteration will find it an absorbing one.
A hell of a yarn.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2023
ISBN: 9781982185442
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 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 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
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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