A dramatic and respectful homage to 12 intrepid mountaineers who sought to master not only the tallest mountain in North...
A vivid revisitation of a historic Alaskan mountain climbing expedition.
In 1967, when Hall, former editor and publisher of Alaska magazine, was 5, his father, the superintendent at Mount McKinley National Park, took him along after being dispatched to the mountain (known to locals as “Denali”) to rescue climbers swept up in whiteout blizzard conditions at the summit. The author’s memory of that event proved enduring enough for him to spend seven years skillfully gathering documentation and verbatim testimonials of the event in which hypothermia claimed the lives of seven brave mountaineers. Brigham Young University student Joe Wilcox, a novice climber with prodigious ambitions, enlisted a group of adventurers of varying experience levels to accompany him on a whirlwind ascent of Mount McKinley. Hall intricately describes their epic trek from its beginnings along the Alaska Highway through seven sequentially numbered campsites along the mountainside, where grievances were aired and dissolved as the group bonded while carefully acclimatizing themselves to avoid oxygen-deficiency–inducing hypoxia. With only a two-day weather forecast, a small, agreed-upon combination of both groups successfully reached Denali’s summit. However, an unprecedented combination of storm fronts in the wake of the second team’s ascent would strand them on the summit approach. Hall delivers this tragic event through his recounting of recorded radio conversations, journal entries and pages of grisly detail. Amplifying the narrative is an opening section of statistical data on the extreme nature of Denali’s “remote and exotic” terrain, its frosty and unpredictable atmospheric conditions, and other expeditions that have attempted to scale its towering 20,320-foot peak.
A dramatic and respectful homage to 12 intrepid mountaineers who sought to master not only the tallest mountain in North America, but “arguably the biggest mountain on the planet.”Pub Date: June 12, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-525-95406-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
