Caveats aside, dogged research and hard travel to distant places make for a gem in the literature of survival under dire...
A flabbergasting, if leisurely paced, story of survival in the Far North during the 18th century, shrouded by the enjoyable mystery of half-understood but decidedly atavistic circumstances.
A voracious fan of adventure-travel literature, Roberts (Escape from Luciania, 2002, etc.) came across a fragmentary report of four Russian walrus-hunters who were shipwrecked on the Svarlbard Archipelago in the high Arctic—a collection of barren plateaus, made of basalt, glaciers, and bad weather, wild and elemental and described precisely here—and survived for six years, from 1743 until 1749, having carried ashore exactly one musket, a bag of flour, and a pouch of tobacco. Although Roberts must rely chiefly on the narrative of Pierre Le Roy, whom he takes to task (at times to the point of irritation) for “scholarly pretension,” “odd discrepencies,” and the “annoyance and distrust” he provokes in Roberts, he is also an archival ferret, digging up plenty of tantalizing references. But most of all, Roberts is simply agog that the men survived so long in a treeless place fabled for its polar-bear population, a creature that considers humans altogether choice fare. The story is a chain of quests—of “the shadowy Klingstedt, the fugitive artifacts, the vanished ‘X’ on the map.” Roberts and a small band of comrades visit the island where the Russian whalers likely spent their 2,000 days. He learns, from talking to northern Russian locals, how the men may have passed the long, dark time: keeping Saints' Days, doing daily chores, and engaging in the art of knot-tying (“each [hunter] ties a rope into an endless number of knots, now again unties it, and thus, now tying the knots, now undoing them again, spends nearly half the winter”).
Caveats aside, dogged research and hard travel to distant places make for a gem in the literature of survival under dire conditions.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-2431-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
