A flawed but well-written and entertaining sports story.
Guardian senior sportswriter Bull recounts the history of modern bobsledding and the four men who led the American team to victory at the 1932 Winter Olympics.
The late-19th-century development of the automobile primed popular taste for speed in both the United States and Europe. At this time, bobsledding became a craze on both sides of the Atlantic. By the early 20th century, it had gone from an “enjoyable pastime” to an activity that caused countless injuries and many deaths. Bobsledding also became a sport that helped revitalize the moribund tourist economy of St. Moritz, a Swiss Alpine resort that opened the first bobsled track in 1902. As sleds became faster and more dangerous, the sport became increasingly popular among spectators and sportsmen looking for the ultimate winter thrill. Against this backdrop, Bull tells the story of four individuals—Billy Fiske, the speed-loving son of an American banker; Jay O’Brien, a New York bon vivant; Eddie Eagan, a champion boxer; and Tippy Gray, a silent film star—who became some of the greatest heroes of early competitive bobsledding. He interweaves the story of their exploits with the behind-the-scene intrigues and boardroom politicking that characterized the 1932 Lake Placid Olympics, the first to ever be held on American soil. Part of an international group of 52 bobsledders dubbed the “suicide club,” the team went on to not only beat local Lake Placid favorites, but also break speed records and win the gold medal. The care Bull demonstrates in developing each of the figures in this engrossing narrative is almost novelistic, but this attention to detail also causes the narrative to digress too much toward the end, where Bull elaborates on the short post-victory life of daredevil team captain Fiske, who went on to become a volunteer fighter pilot for the British and die fighting the Germans in 1940.
A flawed but well-written and entertaining sports story.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59240-909-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Avery
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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