Refreshingly breezy, despite the degree of detail: a saga of life under sail that touches to the quick. (Photos, not seen)
Another resonant seafaring tale from Lundy (Godforsaken Sea, 1999), as a square-rigger rounds Cape Horn at the close of the 19th century.
The author’s great-great-uncle was a seaman on a merchant sailing vessel that sailed from Liverpool to Valparaiso carrying coal that would, ironically, be used by the steamships that ensured the obsolescence of sailing ships. Combining his fragments of information about his uncle’s life with what is known about this particularly difficult route, Lundy shapes a blow-by-blow narrative of his uncle’s passage. He describes the look and lay of the vessel’s architecture, the daily activities of the seamen, the doings of the captain’s wife, the torrent of inventive vulgarities streaming nonstop from the mate, the gradual deterioration of the men’s physical well-being and their behavior, and the consequent birth of petty rivalries and antagonisms. Lundy draws a crack picture of the last days when sailing ships were used as common transport and doesn’t scant the sheer brutality of the work. (Crimping, a legal form of shanghaiing, was often the only way to secure enough men to crew the ships.) He avoids melodrama, but there is no escaping the weather, or the urgency that gives way to terror as winds grow and the seas become an outrageous tumble of trough and crest. Lundy is particularly good at evoking the most dangerous situations, recounting the interplay between heavy weather and the captain's decisions with grim realism, yet lyrically portraying the ship as a living thing that must work, if not in harmony then at least in concert with the riotous elements that surround it. He writes with the ease of one familiar with boats, while not expecting the same from his readers.
Refreshingly breezy, despite the degree of detail: a saga of life under sail that touches to the quick. (Photos, not seen)Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-621012-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2003
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
© Copyright 2025 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.
