Hunter turns what seems like a well-known story into something well worth exploring again.
Successful historiographical detective work provides Hunter (Half Moon: Henry Hudson and the Voyage that Redrew the Map of the New World, 2009, etc.) with the means to rework aspects of the careers of Christopher Columbus and John Cabot.
The author puts together an intriguing account from an international cooperative research effort among historians to reconstruct sources that were either destroyed or lost. He has also accessed documents in Spanish, Latin, French and Italian, especially from collections appearing since the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ voyage, in 1992. Hunter presents a reconstruction of the political, financial and social networks and activities of which the ocean explorers were a part, and shows their nautical adventures in a new light. Slave traders from Genoese and Florentine banking houses put up money for the voyages, even while organizing sugar plantations in the Canaries. The powers and privileges of personal possession each explorer sought to exercise were so similar, Hunter argues, because both were based on an earlier Portuguese proposal presented in the 1480s with support from the same Genoese and Florentine financial interests. Cabot, a real-estate speculator and projector, did not have the same nautical skill set as Columbus. He did project the same kind of bare-faced confidence and courage that enabled Columbus to withstand ridicule and stay the course. He may even have accompanied Columbus on his second voyage as the builder of the future port for Espaniola. Cabot always had to stay one step ahead of creditors to keep out of jail, and Columbus had to work overtime to maintain the stories he told, and the deceptions he circulated, to keep his enterprise going.
Hunter turns what seems like a well-known story into something well worth exploring again.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-230-11011-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2011
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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