Shaw’s intimately detailed account of the Arctic’s sinking and the struggles of those who survived will appeal not only to...
A sensitive history of the doomed steamship Arctic and her courageous captain, demonstrating the ability of a veteran sailor and maritime author (Flying Cloud, 2000) to render nautical history both accessible and poignant.
Shaw introduces Captain James Luce, a seasoned American sailor with a reputation for just and enlightened leadership in an era when autocratic brutality was the norm on the high seas. Luce’s talent for handling people, according to Shaw, earned him not only the lucrative command of the largest and most luxurious steamship of the Collins line, but also an important role in wresting monopolistic control of the Atlantic mail trade from the smaller British steamships. Pressured by Collins himself to accept risk during the treacherous North Atlantic storm season and fueled by nationalistic Anglo-American tensions, Luce tore across the Atlantic in the midst of a thick fog. Drawing extensively from survivors’ accounts and written descriptions of earlier Arctic passages, Shaw expertly reconstructs the growing panic of the crew and passengers as the ship rammed a smaller craft mid-voyage and slowly began to sink. This panic, Shaw shows, flamed into the most notorious lapse of duty by 19th-century American sailors: 45 crewmen stole lifeboats and rowed for Newfoundland, leaving Captain Luce and his first mate to try to save the remaining 370 passengers alone. In the aftermath of the sinking, Luce watched his young son die among the wreckage and, Shaw argues, earned himself international fame and respect for his courageous attempts to salvage lives from the icy North Atlantic.
Shaw’s intimately detailed account of the Arctic’s sinking and the struggles of those who survived will appeal not only to those who reveled in the bathos of the film Titanic but to all readers with a serious interest in nautical history and courage. (8-page photo insert, maps)Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-2217-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002
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 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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