With stirring detail and perceptive insight about the pilots and the public, Jackson recaptures the tone and tenor of a...
A talented storyteller re-creates the signature moment of aviation’s golden age.
By the spring of 1927, the technology, money and pool of design and piloting talent had reached a critical mass. Clearly someone would soon fly from New York to Paris nonstop and capture the $25,000 Orteig Prize, unclaimed since 1919. By then World War I had transformed the image of aviators from eccentric flying fools to dashing “knights of the air.” The Jazz Age publicity machine, newly augmented by radio and newsreels, prepared to catapult to unprecedented fame whoever crossed the Atlantic first. Notable candidates included the Italian Francesco de Pinedo, Frenchmen René Fonck, Charles Nungesser and François Coli, Americans Charles Levine, Bert Acosta, Clarence Chamberlin, Noel Davis, Floyd Bennett and Richard E. Byrd, the polar explorer already accustomed to the “hero business.” And, of course, a young mail pilot and his plane, Spirit of St. Louis. The glare attending Charles Lindbergh’s triumph has all but obscured his rivals, almost every one of whom was better known, better equipped, more experienced and at least as able. Without diminishing the Lone Eagle’s achievement, Jackson (The Thief at the End of the World: Rubber, Power, and the Seeds of Empire, 2008, etc.) makes clear the “cult of Lindbergh” would have evaporated had he not won, and that a combination of skill, luck and the misfortunes of his competitors allowed him to survive the “Great Atlantic Derby” and relegate his competitors to footnotes. Jackson rescues the stories of these and other fliers, some of them killed, the rest severely marked by the great race. Throughout, he folds in unfailingly apt observations about the psychology of aviators, the peculiar mix of wealth and want that characterized the 1920s, the hunger for heroes, the role of chance and the turbocharging effect of mass media.
With stirring detail and perceptive insight about the pilots and the public, Jackson recaptures the tone and tenor of a frantic era’s national obsession.Pub Date: May 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-374-10675-1
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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