Solidly researched history presented with verve and gusto.
Provincial sailors challenge an empire in this rousing account of the Continental Navy.
In late 1775, the Continental Congress set out to assemble a modest navy to confront the British warships that had been shelling Colonial towns. After independence was declared, the navy’s duties expanded to include escorting merchantmen and harassing British shipping. The project appeared nearly impossible—the British fleet was the world’s most powerful—and the notion that it could be effectively opposed by a few hastily built or purchased ships appeared preposterous—all of which just makes this story the more stirring. McGrath (John Barry: An American Hero in the Age of Sail, 2010) delivers a lively history of the Continental Navy, from its birth at the urging of John Adams to the end of the war, replete with political and diplomatic intrigue, personal tragedies, shipwrecks, prison escapes and plenty of sea battles. John Paul Jones is here, of course, but the author also brings to the fore such lesser-known but equally audacious warriors as Gustavus Conyngham and John Barry. Throughout, the commanders battle not just the enemy, but the incompetence to be expected in a fledgling military service, as well as shortages of men, arms and money, often exacerbated by a dilatory and bankrupt Congress whose members were financing privateers competing with the navy for resources. With discouraging frequency, the new navy’s ships were wrecked, sunk or captured to be used against the rebellious colonists, but the tiny fleet nevertheless provided critical assistance by supplying Washington’s army with desperately needed munitions and supplies; the fleet also diverted British naval resources by carrying the war into European and Caribbean waters. McGrath puts readers at ease by unobtrusively explaining the technical aspects of naval warfare in the age of sail. His gripping descriptions of pursuit and combat at sea are the equal of any fiction, with the added virtue of being entirely true.
Solidly researched history presented with verve and gusto.Pub Date: July 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-451-41610-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: NAL Caliber/Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
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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