Crack investigative reporting of a terrible event that could and should have been averted.
Journalist Drye debuts with an engrossingly told, sorry story of a hurricane that killed hundreds of men working on a federal construction project.
FDR’s Works Progress Administration, established to boost employment during the Depression, in one of its programs hired WWI veterans to build bridges connecting the islands of the Florida Keys. The vets were a rough bunch—“shell-shocked, whiskey-shocked and depression-shocked,” in the words of a New York Times reporter who came south to investigate their camps of crummy wooden shacks—who had alienated both the inhabitants of the Keys’ tightly knit, backwater settlements and the New Dealers in Washington funding their paychecks. But they certainly didn't deserve the shellacking they took at the hands of a compact and ferocious hurricane that swept over the Keys on September 2, 1935. As Drye's account reveals, little preparation had been made to evacuate the area by train, and the primitive hurricane warning capabilities of the time meant that the storm’s track was not definitely known until the last minute. A series of poor decisions and predictable snafus resulted in the trains being sent too late, at the cost of 253 veterans’ lives. The author handles with aplomb the tangled bureaucratic shenanigans that left the vets exposed and vividly captures the hurricane’s monstrous energy: it lifted 100-ton railroad cars off the tracks, pushed winds in excess of 160 mph, and sent a storm surge in excess of 20 feet washing straight over many of the Keys. “Some died quickly; others lingered horribly after the hurricane passed and died slowly from thirst and untended injuries,” writes Drye, who adds a final coda charting politicians’ pathetic efforts to make hay from the disaster, as Republicans hoped it would help them unseat Roosevelt and his WPA in the 1936 elections and Democrats wriggled to dodge any culpability.
Crack investigative reporting of a terrible event that could and should have been averted.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-7922-8010-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: National Geographic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2002
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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