by Charles Gallenkamp ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2001
An old-fashioned adventure story, for better or worse.
A WASP hunts dinosaurs in the Gobi.
A generation or two ago young men used to read stories like this over and over again, which is both the strength and the weakness of archaeologist Gallenkamp’s (Maya, not reviewed) biography of the adventurous paleontologist Roy Chapman Andrews. Throughout the 1920s Andrews led a series of expeditions into Mongolia under the auspices of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Known as the Central Asiatic Expeditions, they never achieved their original goal of proving that Asia, rather than Africa, was the cradle of mankind, but they did make spectacular fossil finds, chart vast areas of the Gobi, and win extraordinary fame for Andrews, who fit the model of gentleman-adventurer to a tee. The author relates Andrews’s adventures entertainingly enough, although not with the elegance that Andrews himself displayed in his many books and articles. And while Andrews’s expeditions (sponsored in part by Standard Oil and Dodge) may not have the romance of Sven Heden’s or Sir Francis Younghusband’s, there are more than enough close scrapes and exotic locales to keep the pages turning. Still, in the end both Andrews’s life and Gallenkamp’s telling leave a sour taste in the mouth, for the Central Asiatic Expeditions had a eugenic rationale that is barely touched on here, and the condescending tone with which the polo playing, openly imperialistic Andrews treated the Chinese is odious. The author disclaims racism and imperialism, but he does nothing to distance himself from Andrews’s view that the Chinese were being silly in placing restrictions on what he did in (and removed from) Chinese territory; for the most part, in fact, his voice blends with Andrews’s on these points. Such unadulterated hero worship is not only unsettling, but bad scholarship as well.
An old-fashioned adventure story, for better or worse.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-89093-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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