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THE PIRATE PRINCE

DISCOVERING THE PRICELESS TREASURE OF THE SUNKEN SHIP WHYDAH

The adventures of ``piratologist'' Clifford—told with the help of Turchi (Magician, 1991)—as he tracks down the wreck of the legendary Whydah, the largest pirate ship of all. Clifford first heard of the mother ship of Black Sam Bellamy's outlaw fleet while listening as a child to his Uncle Bill's tales of 18th-century buccaneers. Everyone knew where the Whydah sank in 1717—in the Wellfleet surf off Cape Cod—and rumor had it that the treasure had never been recovered. What could be more inviting to a sea-bitten boy? As an adult, working the Cape as a nautical trouble-shooter, Clifford delved into the records of the wreck. Convinced that the treasure remained buried in the sands, he corralled investors with an irresistible sales pitch (``this is the beginning of a whole new high-tech treasure-hunting industry'') and assembled a colorful team of workers—including the Aspen, Colorado, police chief; a 6'10'' mariner; and John F. Kennedy, Jr. Through dogged analysis of old journals—especially that of Cyprian Southack, the 18th-century on-site investigator—Clifford pinpointed the location of the treasure trove, but two years of high-tech digging ensued before the first Whydah cannonball was brought up, in 1984. Along the way, Clifford battled reams of governmental red tape, terrible weather, and rival claim jumpers. But he got his reward, in the form of over 100,000 retrieved items, including thousands of coins and a pirate leg bone (a complete inventory is provided in an appendix). The search has been suspended, but Clifford indicates that the bulk of the treasure remains in the briny deep, for future salvagers to raise. The real coin—filled with the thrills and tedium of treasure hunting; sweaty at times, as Clifford recounts his marital woes, but otherwise the clear winner of this year's Pegleg and Patch Award. (Sixteen pages of color & b&w photographs—not seen)

Pub Date: July 7, 1993

ISBN: 0-671-76824-7

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1993

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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