A boozy and often funny investigation into a little-understood corner of America.
The clown prince of "trash prose" cracks the coconut-wireless wide open in a hip exposé of Hawaii's North Shore surfing culture.
Each year, the best surfers in the world converge on Oahu's North Shore for a chance to get "barreled" by the world-famous Bonzai Pipeline. There are riches to be won and legends to be created for all those fortunate enough to survive the monster wave's curling caress. But that's only the frothy, foamy surface of this story. According to Smith, ex–war correspondent and adventure writer and current “editor-at-living-large” of Surfing magazine, a much grimier truth exists far beyond dreamy visions of swaying palm trees and hula girls dispensing fragrant leis to wide-eyed tourists. Basically seen through the lens of a single day covering a high-stakes surfing showdown, Smith paints an oppressive, although darkly amusing, landscape of ramshackle frat houses and hair-trigger Hawaiians with punishing "Toyota Land Cruiser–sized" arms. The ultimate insider, the author spends his days tiptoeing around the island's nativist elite and trying hard to remember the etiquette that will spare him from being "slapped" or "choked out." The droll personal narrative, evocative of Hunter S. Thompson at times, entertains, while superior reporting informs and illuminates much about the surf industry's peculiar machinations, its cavalcade of sun-bleached heroes and the troubled history of Hawaii itself. "I will always remember that first trip to the North Shore,” he writes. “It seemed run down. It seemed unkempt. It seemed used. It seemed rotten. It was not the gilded expanse of my imagination. It was rough and dirty.” Effortlessly shifting from the profound to the profane, and back again, Smith is alternately self-reverential and self-mocking in tone but totally engrossed in the "madness" that ensues every winter when "the pipe is pumping.”
A boozy and often funny investigation into a little-understood corner of America.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-220252-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: It Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
