A well-researched, informative nail-biter.
Riveting account of the 1920 sinking of US submarine S-Five and the improbable escape of her crew.
When Lieutenant Commander Charles “Savvy” Cooke gave orders for the S-Five to run through a practice dive, he had no reason to expect disaster. The newly commissioned sub had been through much more rigorous tests before setting out on this, her first mission. Two-and-a-half minutes later, however, the nose of the 870-ton vessel slammed into the ocean floor 180 feet down. A senior enlisted man had somehow forgotten to close a crucial ventilation valve, and seawater rapidly flooded the sub. From then on, the crew faced one equipment failure after another until a grim conclusion was reached: the S-Five could not be raised. However, in the crew's attempts to reach the surface by blowing ballast tanks, the 230-foot vessel had ended up so steeply angled that her stern broke the ocean's surface, and crewmembers could hear waves lapping against the hull. Now Cooke had to figure out how to break through the sub's three-quarter-inch steel skin. No acetylene torches were available; the electrical system was inoperative; and the battery system in the engineering room was beginning to leak poisonous chlorine gas as water and air rapidly disappeared. There was barely enough space for the crew to perch; floor and ceiling had become walls, and the seamen clung to machinery and pipes in an effort to rest. In a true race for their lives, the starving, choking sailors managed to hand-drill holes in the sub's side so that they could extend a white flag attached to a length of copper pipe. Hill masterfully interweaves suspense with navy history; the reader is barely breathing when the privately owned steamship S.S. Alanthus spots the wreck, and crew is saved.
A well-researched, informative nail-biter.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2002
ISBN: 0-7432-3677-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2002
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 Yorkerstaff 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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