A low-key family adventure finds mystery and meaning on the mighty Mississippi. In August 1995, Spurr (Steered by the Falling Stars, 1992) set out to retrace the voyage of French explorer Robert de La Salle, the first European to traverse the Mississippi River from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. Like La Salle’s 17th- century journey, Spurr’s is beset by missteps. One wonders how the editor of Practical Sailor magazine could be such a bumbler: He buys Pearl (“without a doubt the homeliest boat I’d ever seen,” Spurr recalls) only a week before his planned departure, leaving little time for much needed repairs—or for pinpointing how far he can go on a tank of gas (a critical calculation on the service-starved lower Mississippi). From his Rhode Island home, he drives to Chicago with 7-year-old son Steve, towing the 20-foot boat on a jerry-rigged trailer, burying its propeller in a truck’s radiator while backing into a McDonalds. Despite the slapstick start, Spurr salvages meaning from the trip. He’s searching for “pre-America,” looking for a glimpse of the virgin wilderness that greeted La Salle. He gets a steady dose in the awesome power of the river itself, and, more fleetingly, in the rare stretches of wilderness on the banks unmarred by settlement or industry. He forges a rather predictable bond with Steve and daughter Adria (who boards in St. Louis), and satisfies, anticlimactically, his “two decades’ quest for tangible proof of La Salle’s presence in North America, for an artifact of any sort that I could actually get my hands on . . .” with a side trip to visit Lee Politsch, keeper of the Ellington stone, a tablet believed to have been carved by La Salle in 1671. A curious flatness robs Spurr’s account of the grand adventurousness his trip seems to promise, leaving instead a sense of melancholy at the mess America has become. (25 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8050-4632-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
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 Yorkerstaff 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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