After being forced into service on a freight ship, a naïve teenager sails around the world, learning more about life than he bargained for.
As a 15-year-old, Jack Sligo is a romantic dreamer; he wants to not only see the world, but experience it. So he ditches his safe, predictable life in Boston and travels to New York where he hopes to get work on a magnificent cruise ship sailing to exotic ports. When New York is a bust, Jack goes to Mobile, Ala., where he hooks up with a couple of seamen who take him out drinking and partying. Upon waking up the next morning, Jack discovers he has been shanghaied; for all intents and purposes, he is now a slave aboard a huge African freighter, the Iron Prince. Contending with hard men, each of whom has a tale of hard-won experience, foreign languages and harsh, tedious work, Jack rapidly matures into a young man. At a small port in Venezuela where he rubs shoulders with criminals, riff-raff and prostitutes, Jack participates in the shanghaiing of a cook. On the ship, Jack befriends a Jamaican named Winston, who was shanghaied at the age of 12. Always on the lookout for a way to escape, Jack and Winston engage in vicious knife fights, battle hurricanes and live through a shipwreck. At the story’s climax, when the ship heads to Odessa in the Soviet Union, Jack finally discovers who he is. Collins writes with authenticity, having lived the life he relates. With the author’s vivid descriptions, the reader can feel the men’s sweat and smell the stink of the ship. The dialogue is crisp and realistic, offering glimpses into each character’s personality. Collins’ effortlessly natural, nonjudgmental voice makes for an easy read. An entertaining, poignant coming-of-age memoir.
Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2011
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 265
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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