An enjoyable read, especially if you’ve got a thing for pirates.
A look inside the world of professional treasure hunters, focused on the search for a sunken pirate ship.
Journalist Kurson (Crashing Through: A True Story of Risk, Adventure, and the Man Who Dared to See, 2007, etc.) tells the story of John Chatterton and John Mattera and their quest for the Golden Fleece, a pirate ship sunk off what is now the Dominican Republic in the 1680s. Joseph Bannister, the ship’s captain, was an English merchant captain who turned pirate. Chatterton and Mattera learned about the ship from Tracy Bowden, himself a legend among treasure hunters, who hired them to find the ship. Kurson focuses on the long, often frustrating search, interspersed by library research in New York and Spain. He gives brief biographies of the two men, tough, driven characters thriving in a world in which death is usually one mistake away. There’s a fair share of drama as they run into debt, argue with each other and with Bowden, and deal with threats to their mission, ranging from claim jumpers to international bans on treasure hunting. Their breakthrough came when they realized the key to the search was the character of the pirate himself. Along the way, readers get a capsule history of the “Golden Age of Piracy,” from about 1650 to 1720, when the likes of Blackbeard, Captain Kidd, and Henry Morgan were active. Kurson has done an impressive amount of research, and he has a good sense of painting scenes, though readers might sometimes wonder where the line is between straight reporting and entertainment. The book tends to jump around too much, though given the long stretches in which the protagonists’ search for Bannister’s ship was stalled, it’s easy to understand why. In the end, Chatterton and Mattera come across as modern heroes, the kind of men the modern world often finds it hard to make a place for.
An enjoyable read, especially if you’ve got a thing for pirates.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6336-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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