An evocative tale of aviation’s rich and risky beginnings, featuring an American pilot’s unsung adventures.
In this historical novel, an around-the-world journey of a “fly boy” hero and his zero of a partner chronicles the time when “flying was new and intriguing.”
At Tokyo’s Narita Airport, over layover sake, a lone traveler enlightens four pilots about the daredevil life of Clyde Pangborn, aka “The King of Barnstormers,” responsible for the first nonstop trans-Pacific flight. He shares Clyde’s riveting midair mishaps and explains how he fought fierce competition from up-and-coming “day aviators,” ever-growing federal regulations, and the unfolding Depression, until reports of Lindbergh’s Atlantic crossing threw a gauntlet at his feet. While Clyde had the experience and ability to accomplish anything in the air, he lacked capital. Enter “bumbling wannabe aviator” Hugh Herndon Jr. and his moneyed mother, Mrs. Alice Boardman. After a series of mistakes during their perilous journey threaten to take down their plane (Miss Veedol), the usually taciturn Clyde tells Hugh, “Rich boys like you are too soft.” The technical and historical research of the Heikell brothers is top-notch and their odd couple, exotic locales, and white-knuckled flight scenes lend the novel a cinematic quality. Indeed, the plot seems ready-made for Hollywood. The dialogue, however, loaded with jargon and dry exposition, tends to detract from the story’s overall propulsion. The difficult relationship between Clyde and Hugh fuels the book, yet their long midflight arguments over how cold, hungry and bored they are cause the plot to sputter—as do constant cutaways to the inner lives of secondary characters on the ground. Although the pilots ask for the “mid version” of Clyde’s story, the narrator delves into the personal stories of his mother, Opal; his hometown love interest, Diane; and, while held for treason in Japan, the smitten Yumiko—among others. It seems as if, like Hugh, the narrator sometimes loses sight of his main duty: keeping us in the air.
An evocative tale of aviation’s rich and risky beginnings, featuring an American pilot’s unsung adventures.Pub Date: May 18, 2012
ISBN: 978-1468006087
Page Count: 238
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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