Good reading for Civil War buffs, taking the naval aspect of the conflict well beyond the usual Monitor and Merrimac fare.
A saga of secessionists on the high seas, causing mayhem wherever they wandered.
The Shenandoah began life as a Scottish commercial vessel called the Sea King, but, as Chaffin (Pathfinder, 2002) notes, became one of the finest ships in the Confederate navy. Acquired in October 1864—instrumental in the acquisition was Theodore Roosevelt’s uncle, a Georgian named James Bulloch, who later “played a major role in convincing the future U.S. president of the priority of attaining global naval superiority for America”—the Shenandoah was technologically advanced, with a screw propeller as well as tall sails. Commanded by James Waddell, it was also, technically, a privateer, a pirate ship with a letter of marque. Privateering was by then out of favor among the European powers, but the U.S. government had refused to sign a treaty banning it (think Kyoto Protocol), a decision that would haunt Yankee sailors when the Shenandoah circumnavigated the globe, sank 34 Union vessels and seized cargoes worth more than $1.4 million. The captain’s loyalties remained so strong, Chaffin writes, that the ship went on attacking Union vessels even after Lee surrendered at Appomattox, when it dawned on Waddell, then off the Siberian coast, that he’d better get ship and crew back to the more or less friendly waters of England before the Yankees caught up. Chaffin does a good job of charting the Shenandoah’s path and fortunes, and though the narrative could have stood a little trimming here and there, he makes it clear that there were plenty of worse places to be in the war than on the ship’s decks; the officers had time to read the many books they liberated from enemy vessels, while the crew, for all its rebel orthodoxy, merrily disported themselves among the dark women of Ascension, unrepentant pirates to the last.
Good reading for Civil War buffs, taking the naval aspect of the conflict well beyond the usual Monitor and Merrimac fare.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-8090-9511-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2005
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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