A true-life thriller—and, yes, there just might be more Double Eagles out there.
The former head of Sotheby’s coin department tracks one of the most coveted American coins from its Depression-era minting to a spectacular auction in July 2002, when one example sold for more than $7.5 million.
Debut author Tripp rightly begins his story of the 1933 Double Eagle, a $20 gold piece, with its designer, celebrated sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Commissioned (if not outright bullied) by Theodore Roosevelt in 1905 to restore mythic grandeur to US coinage, Saint-Gaudens created the beautiful Double Eagle. But as the incoming Roosevelt administration faced economic catastrophe in 1933—gold was fleeing the country, and banks were toppling like tenpins—his quick-thinking Treasury Secretary convinced FDR to take the country off the gold standard, recall all gold tender, and make ownership of it illegal. But wait: somebody forgot to tell the US Mint in Philadelphia, which stamped out thousands of brand-new 1933 $20 Double Eagles before finally getting the word just as the coins were about to be issued. Except for two placed on display at the Smithsonian, all Double Eagles were remelted into gold bars—supposedly. But in 1944, agents for Egypt’s King Farouk applied for—and, astonishingly, obtained—an export license for a ’33 Double Eagle, destined for the king’s prodigious coin collection. Hearing that Farouk paid more than $1,500 for his, coin dealers scattered across the US began running ads soliciting Double Eagles. A newspaper editor finally buzzed the Secret Service (first responders in counterfeit cases) and reminded them that the coin was not supposed to exist. For Agent Strang of the Secret Service, the game was afoot, and Tripp’s account of the tortuous recapture of all known “escaped” coins makes for exciting reading.
A true-life thriller—and, yes, there just might be more Double Eagles out there.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-4574-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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