Next book

SAILING THE GRAVEYARD SEA

THE DEATHLY VOYAGE OF THE SOMERS, THE U.S. NAVY’S ONLY MUTINY, AND THE TRIAL THAT GRIPPED THE NATION

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

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 60


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2017


  • New York Times Bestseller


  • IndieBound Bestseller


  • National Book Award Finalist

Next book

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 60


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2017


  • New York Times Bestseller


  • IndieBound Bestseller


  • National Book Award Finalist

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

Next book

NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

Close Quickview