Plenty to digest for the history-minded reader who enjoys a bracing story of courage and adventure on the uncharted high...
Vivid narrative of the explorer’s fourth and most harrowing New World trip reveals a courageous, enigmatic man who weathered the perils of nature and the intrigue of contemporaries high and low.
Borrowing freely from previous works, Dugard (Farther Than Any Man: The Rise and Fall of Captain James Cook, 2001, etc.) weaves a compelling narrative set neatly against a colorful historical background. During his last voyage, the “Admiral of the Ocean Sea” survived attacks by primitives, several mutinies and a shipwreck that led to a yearlong sojourn in Jamaica. His intrepid nature during those ordeals hasn’t really received its due until now. Columbus was certainly no saint; an early effort to have him beatified by the Catholic Church was quickly scuttled by stories of his enslavement of many natives. But Dugard’s account reveals a man who was resourceful, persistent and possessed with an uncanny knack for making the right decisions at the right time. Columbus was also a consummate mariner, often navigating by sheer instinct and sensing the onset of storms long before anyone else. And he was a great leader of men: fair and generous with his crew, ruthlessly efficient when dealing with his numerous enemies. Columbus’s fame and fortune bred many rivals, covetous of his power in the New World. Within ten years of his claiming for Spain the island of Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic), he was thrown into prison there, his house and goods confiscated. As in any good story, heroes and villains abound. Columbus’s younger brother and indomitable partner Bartolome is a particularly noteworthy good guy; baddies include King Ferdinand himself, who quickly reneged on his promise to give Columbus rule over his New World discoveries. One caveat: the author’s focus on the harrowing coordinates of Columbus’s life means that Dugard never manages to unravel his complex personality.
Plenty to digest for the history-minded reader who enjoys a bracing story of courage and adventure on the uncharted high seas.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-316-82883-1
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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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