Exciting and informative—every detail contributes to a greater understanding of British maritime history.
Willis (Fighting at Sea in the Eighteenth Century: The Art of Sailing Warfare, 2008, etc.) follows the adventures of the Temeraire, which played an integral role in British military successes and was the subject of J.M.W. Turner’s masterpiece The Fighting Temeraire (1839).
A little-known fact about the Temeraire is that two famous ships carried the name; the first was a French warship that the British captured in the Battle of Lagos in 1759. She was so symbolic in stature and design that the British, 15 years later, named their most important new ship after her. Immediately the new Temeraire was in the thick of the Napoleonic Wars, battling not only the enemy, but the more common disturbances found at sea—constant battles with scurvy, lack of fresh supplies and mutiny. So hazardous was the mutiny of 1801 that the ship was forced to return to England, and 12 mutineers were hanged in a highly publicized trial. Not long afterward, Horatio Nelson was named leader of the fleet designated to (once again) wage war with France. Under his command, the Victory and Temeraire fought side-by-side at the famed Battle of Trafalgar. It was in this battle that the mighty Temeraire lived up to its fame as one of the best British warships of all time. Just as the lead ship, the Victory, was compromised and Nelson injured, “the Temeraire appeared out of the smoke...and rammed the [French ship] Redoutable with such force” that the French were ultimately forced to surrender. Upon the great ship's heroic return to Britain, masses thronged the port to catch a glimpse. It’s possible that Turner, already a successful artist at the time, was one of the revelers, and drew on this experience later when he created his famous painting. In this compelling narrative, Willis captures the atmosphere of great change that marked the era, writing with infectious enthusiasm about the warship and the art it inspired.
Exciting and informative—every detail contributes to a greater understanding of British maritime history.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-60598-124-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
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 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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