Engaging stories from a fabled place where many arrived broke and most left that way.
How a mammoth vein of silver ore—a “Babylon of the Great American Desert”—helped shape the West.
Washington Post Book World contributing editor Drabelle begins in 1857 on a mountainside on the Nevada side of the Sierras. Rumors of gold drew prospectors from the abandoned remains of California’s Forty-Niner rush. In the yet unnamed Virginia City, initial diggings quickly showed that the Nevada find would be of the silver variety. What would years later be revealed as a single vein stretching two miles long would, during the following two decades, yield a series of bonanzas interspersed with excesses of greed, deception and plenty of good times. Ironies, the author writes, began to spring up immediately. The Comstock Lode took its name from a blowhard self-promoter who was no good at mining or much else, and who eventually committed suicide. The flurry of “culture” drawn by the promised wealth included newspapers that employed journalists of the stature of Mark Twain (frequently quoted here) and Ambrose Bierce, yet were edited by men who published at the beck and call of the powerful. Drabelle is thorough in documenting conflicts with exploited Native Americans, the stress of hard-rock mining at deep levels where temperatures could fell a man in 15 minutes and the sheer technological innovation—later adapted across other industries—needed to process silver ore efficiently. The bulk of the narrative, however, involves the few who actually made off with the riches and how they did it: manipulating mining share prices down to buy them, up to sell them, assessing speculators for operating expenses, charging them fraudulently via ore-processing mills they also controlled—and, of course, buying the necessary judges and/or juries when stockholder or rivals’ lawsuits were launched.
Engaging stories from a fabled place where many arrived broke and most left that way.Pub Date: July 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-37947-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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