At times clumsy, but nonetheless an important story of perseverance in the face of natural disasters and unspeakable racism.
A jumbled and speculative—but also affecting—biography of the leader of the only all-black unit of the US Life-Saving Service, stationed at Pea Island, North Carolina, in the final decades of the 19th century.
Wright (English/Univ. of Illinois) and Zoby (English/Caspar Coll.) faced a daunting task—to chart the life of Etheridge, born a slave on January 16, 1842. As the authors note, the documentary record for slaves is slender even in the best of circumstances, and so they were forced to paint much historical background and give Etheridge’s story a colorful context, if not a sharp focus. And so they provide 100 pages of Civil War history, chronicling the exploits of Etheridge’s “African Brigade” (he enlisted in August 1863) but not of Etheridge himself, for his personal experiences are largely unknown. At times this material (published elsewhere in much detail) is superfluous. Once the war ends, however, and Etheridge returns to the Outer Banks, the authors are on firmer historical ground. The characteristic stormy weather in the region caused many shipwrecks, so between 1873 and 1874 the federal government established stations for the Life-Saving Service (or LSS—the agency that would one day be replaced by the Coast Guard). Etheridge, who had distinguished himself as an LSS surfman, earned an appointment as keeper of Station 17 in 1880. The whites on the crew promptly quit, so (with approval from his superiors) he appointed an all-black crew that became exemplary—largely due to Etheridge’s devotion to duty, his strict schedule of drills, and the enormous respect he enjoyed along the coast. Wright and Zoby are at their best when narrating some the exciting rescues—the one in the prologue is a gem of adventure-writing. But the story lacks a compelling organization, and the narrative occasionally drifts like flotsam. And the lack of end- or footnotes will retard subsequent scholarship.
At times clumsy, but nonetheless an important story of perseverance in the face of natural disasters and unspeakable racism.Pub Date: July 24, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-87304-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
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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