A diligent, exacting contribution to a small but important historical record.
The comprehensive history of the Alaska Packers Association as well as a study of the extraordinary impact new shipping technology has had on the world.
Dyal (Historical Dictionary of the Spanish American War, 1996) has written a labor of love, painstakingly researched over 10 years and the result of half a century of fascination with the shipping industry. The book is essentially a kind of historical catalog of all the large vessels owned, chartered, or otherwise managed by the Alaska Packers Association from 1893 until 1945. Replete with black-and-white photos, the book is neatly organized according to the relationship each vessel had with the association and then by ship type. Dyal makes a compelling argument for the scholarly significance of his efforts: in several ways, the Alaska Packers was an unprecedented company. The largest and longest operating fleet of its kind, it was not primarily designed to produce revenue of its own but rather as a kind of “instrument enabling profit,” transporting workers and supplies. Even more intriguing, though, is Dyal’s contention that the story of the association’s technological transformations is of considerable social significance. “The adoption and adaptation to new technology can be both disruptive and emotional,” he writes. “In the multi-millennial history of commercial sail, the most controversial and perhaps interesting period comprises the years 1870-1920, when maritime transport underwent foundational change.” More reference guide than opportunity for leisurely reading, this impressively exhaustive compilation of ships will, of course, primarily interest the most devoted aficionados. However, the introduction could be of broader interest, as it uses the association’s development as a microcosm of the way technological advancements push and shape commerce.
A diligent, exacting contribution to a small but important historical record.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-1499329209
Page Count: 226
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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