An entertaining, well-researched account of the quest that brims with our fond hopes, foolishness and even desperation.
Former Vice editor Gollner (The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce and Obsession, 2008) may have felt he would need to achieve immortality in order to write this comprehensive, busy book, which bulges with the results of his reading, interviewing and traveling.
By the time his many journeys ended (he notes that he took quite a few he did not write about), the author had settled on the ideas that living forever is/will be impossible and that science is just another name for a belief system. After his introductory comments (that feature the puissance of a particular dream), he examines formal belief systems about immortality—conventional religions and otherwise. He notes the importance of water in many belief systems—“a symbol of all we don’t know.” The most intriguing sections concern Gollner’s connections with illusionist David Copperfield, who has claimed to have found a fountain of youth in the Bahamas. The author visited Copperfield’s islands, and much enjoyed the amenities, but was unable to convince the magician to show him the site—ongoing research, said Copperfield. Throughout these sections, the author also summarizes the role of youth-producing waters in mythology and legend. He then turns to scientific research and discovery in human aging and notes that cells simply cannot live forever, so science holds out no realistic ultimate hope for lives much extended. He also examines some Southern California daffy thinking and visits one of the storage sites for frozen corpses. (Yes, the separate head and torso of Hall of Fame baseball player Ted Williams are waiting for later thawing.) Gollner ends with Buddhism and some words about the “life force.”
An entertaining, well-researched account of the quest that brims with our fond hopes, foolishness and even desperation.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4391-0942-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
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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