Tall ships cast spells, and Drumm catches the witchery of the Eagle’s overpowering presence. (b&w photographs throughout)
Drumm (In the Slick of the Cricket, 1997) knows just what a treat it is to sail on the square-rigged barque Eagle, the Coast Guard’s great training cutter, and he conveys that thrill here, lacing the experience with episodes from the ship’s unforgettable past.
It takes the 300-foot Eagle about two weeks to make the voyage from New London, Connecticut, to Panama on a training run to Oregon, and East Hampton Star journalist Drumm is allowed to join the crew. Trim at 39 feet abeam, the Eagle is capable of putting up more than 21,000 square feet of sail to catch the wind that, as Drumm reflects, “boiled down to the earth’s turning, the spinning of todays into tomorrows. Wind is time passing.” And time weighs heavily on the Eagle, for it was commissioned the Horst Wessel—the name of a Nazi Party martyr—as a training vessel for officers of the Third Reich. The ship was discovered in Bremerhaven in 1946 with a half-dead crew who taught the Coast Guard its ways as they redubbed it Eagle and put it into service training American sailors. Drumm is able to generate some of the flavor of that time through the ship’s log. Any “memory of well-oiled evil” that lurks among the spars has been eclipsed by the Eagle’s role as public-relations tool and by the spirit of the men and women now sailing her. Though the age of skylarking through the upper yards and crosstrees is gone, there is an electric joyousness about the ship “surrounded by canvas and sculpted air,” a thrum of barely contained energy. The strange story of boatswain Karl Dillmann, whose belief in being possessed both of a dead German sailor’s soul and a spiritual affinity to the Eagle, is hard to dismiss.
Tall ships cast spells, and Drumm catches the witchery of the Eagle’s overpowering presence. (b&w photographs throughout)Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2001
ISBN: 0-395-98367-3
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
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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