A vigorous historical page-turner packed with a cast of decidedly colorful (and off-color) actors.
A tangy tale of the 19th century’s last, storied gold rush, timed for its 125th anniversary.
Journalist and Iraq War veteran Castner, who chronicled a comrade’s battlefield death in the excellent All the Ways We Kill and Die (2016), has a fine time depicting the salty, seldom virtuous figures who drifted north to Alaska following the acquisition of the Russian territory in the purchase known as “Seward’s Folly.” There was no folly in it, for the deal opened up a vast new land to economic exploitation, as manifested by the mass arrival of gold-seekers in 1896. Invoking the rational actor theory of economics, the author observes that the boom served the interests of only a very few people in a whirl of pyramid schemes and other scams: “Perhaps ‘Klondicitis’ was the best term for the infectious cloudiness of reason that ran amok,” he writes, also chronicling the racism and contempt for Native peoples that characterized the era. Soon every loose hand in the world, it seemed, was on the way to Dawson City, Juneau, and points north, looking to get rich. Castner’s dramatis personae includes the best known of them all, Jack London, who arrived poor and left pretty much that same way—but with a trove of stories that he would turn into bestsellers. Others are less well known, including a star-crossed band of New Yorkers who were caught by “avalanches, driving winds, plunging temperatures that broke their thermometers” and were reduced to eating their dogs. There’s a lot of swagger and a lot of swishing skirts in Castner’s pages, rife with entertaining accounts of all seven deadly sins, but many of his unfortunates bow in and disappear, even as “the circus left almost as soon as it arrived.”
A vigorous historical page-turner packed with a cast of decidedly colorful (and off-color) actors.Pub Date: April 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-385-54450-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Gibbins combines historical knowledge with a sense of adventure, making this book a highly enjoyable package.
A popular novelist turns his hand to historical writing, focusing on what shipwrecks can tell us.
There’s something inherently romantic about shipwrecks: the mystery, the drama of disaster, the prospect of lost treasure. Gibbins, who’s found acclaim as an author of historical fiction, has long been fascinated with them, and his expertise in both archaeology and diving provides a tone of solid authority to his latest book. The author has personally dived on more than half the wrecks discussed in the book; for the other cases, he draws on historical records and accounts. “Wrecks offer special access to history at all…levels,” he writes. “Unlike many archaeological sites, a wreck represents a single event in which most of the objects were in use at that time and can often be closely dated. What might seem hazy in other evidence can be sharply defined, pointing the way to fresh insights.” Gibbins covers a wide variety of cases, including wrecks dating from classical times; a ship torpedoed during World War II; a Viking longship; a ship of Arab origin that foundered in Indonesian waters in the ninth century; the Mary Rose, the flagship of the navy of Henry VIII; and an Arctic exploring vessel, the Terror (for more on that ship, read Paul Watson’s Ice Ghost). Underwater excavation often produces valuable artifacts, but Gibbins is equally interested in the material that reveals the society of the time. He does an excellent job of placing each wreck within a broader context, as well as examining the human elements of the story. The result is a book that will appeal to readers with an interest in maritime history and who would enjoy a different, and enlightening, perspective.
Gibbins combines historical knowledge with a sense of adventure, making this book a highly enjoyable package.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781250325372
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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