Suffering from the same stilted emotionalism that plagued Cameron's movie, Pellegrino's study nevertheless provides gripping...
A haphazard eulogy to the big boat that refuses to release her grip on the popular imagination.
Following a turgid foreword by Titanic director James Cameron (in which the nastiest stereotypes of Hollywood illiteracy receive ample confirmation), Pellegrino (Return to Sodom and Gomorrah, 1994, etc.) launches into his eclectic collection of tales from the Titanic. In this grand hodgepodge, the reader meets such intriguing characters as the ship's baker (who survived by sheer force of will), lookout Frederick Fleet (who bore the brunt of the blame for the accident), and undocumented passenger Howard Irwin (who disappeared without a trace). Such stories are told to mixed effect: when Pellegrino narrates simply and subtly, he sketches a thumbnail portrait of a person alive with minute detail. On the other hand, his authorial voice at times intrudes with astounding banalities ("I know all about ghosts") and stilted dramatizations ("Tell your mother that I loved her dearly and still do"). The re-creations of the Titanic's final moments are linked to scientific discussions of the archaeological processes of investigating her. Pellegrino examines the immense difficulties of such a study in loving detail (and in accessible and exciting prose). For example, his analysis of the rusticles (a bacterial species that combines itself symbiotically with worms) is bizarrely fascinating; such scientific exuberance, however, is less enjoyable when directed to computing the ratio of survival between dust mites and cockroaches. In an afterword and postscript, Pellegrino considers the fates of the crew and their passengers, lists the expeditions that have studied the ship's wreckage, and ponders the dangers of technological hubris.
Suffering from the same stilted emotionalism that plagued Cameron's movie, Pellegrino's study nevertheless provides gripping reading due to the inherent fascination of the ship and her watery grave.Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-688-13955-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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