The debate remains open, but Henderson provides plenty of fuel for Cook loyalists.
Henderson (Fatal North, 2001, etc.) offers another nail-biting true adventure, this one involving the turn-of-the-20th-century rivalry between contemporaries who both claimed to be the first man to the Pole.
Initially, their shared passion for the Far North brought together Navy man Robert Peary, a bulldog of an explorer, and the gentle physician Frederick Cook. But after Peary invoked his right as expedition leader and refused to allow crew doctor Cook to present a paper on the medical and reproductive practices of the Eskimo, their paths diverged. Peary continued his assaults on the Pole, failing repeatedly, while Cook diversified his explorations to include climbing Mt. McKinley (he was the first man to ever reach its summit) and exploring Antarctica (he was the first American to explore both the northern and southern polar regions). Henderson makes their days vivid, with much discussion of such ancillary characters as Peary’s wife, who insisted on traveling with him whenever possible, and events like Cook’s near miss in getting funding from Andrew Carnegie. This engrossing story of two divergent yet entwined fates climaxes with twin journeys to the North Pole. Both men claimed to have reached the “Big Nail” (as the Eskimos dubbed it) within days of each other. Henderson comes down squarely on Cook’s side, painting the doctor as an honest man, interested only in exploration, who was ill-equipped to deal with Peary’s desperation, willingness to discredit his onetime colleague, and generally dirty tactics. A judge friendly with the Peary family even managed to throw Cook into jail for 14 years. For the reader, the pain of witnessing Cook’s vilification is almost counterbalanced by his exoneration 75 years later—but not quite.
The debate remains open, but Henderson provides plenty of fuel for Cook loyalists.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-393-05791-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004
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 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
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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