by Donald S. Johnson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 1, 1996
Entertaining voyages into the geography of the imagination, from a sailor and journalist (Charting the Sea of Darkness, not reviewed). In the early days of cartography, islands came and islands went. Unable to plot longitude, explorers should have advised their mapmakers: Here there be islands, maybe. There were other reasons for these illusory shards of terra firma: mirages and delusions, shape-shifting mountains that emerged and then sank again beneath the waves, and offshore banks. In the North Atlantic, a few of these phantom isles have persisted in our imaginations—it is their story that Johnson relates. There is the Isle of Demons, said to be populated by beasts and evil spirits. Johnson fancies the demonic cries heard by mariners were those of nesting pelagic birds, perhaps on Funk Island. There is the curious disappearence of the inhabited island of Frisland, supposedly discovered by the 14th-century voyager Nicolo Zeno. Buss Island, frequently sighted by ships looking for the Northwest Passage, is now gone; was it just another ``false horizon created by the tricks and deceptive appearances of the Arctic atmosphere''? Consider Antilla, its seven cities home to seven refugee bishops, and Hy-Brazil, revealed once every seven years when its veil of fog lifts. Easily one of the best tales is that of Saint Ursula and her 11,000 virgin companions, martyred by Huns at the behest of the Roman emperor. The islands named after her are no phantoms—they sit clear as day in the Caribbean, tagged by Christoper Columbus—but her legend may well be, suggests Johnson. He pulls together as much as he can about vanished or fabulous islands, plumbing ancient texts for sightings and commentary, poring over early maps that chart the peregrinations of the islands, then serves up his findings with a light, bright touch. A feast for those who hunger after terra incognita. (35 maps and illustrations)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-8027-1320-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1996
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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 Yorker staff 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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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