Strong material met with solid storytelling: sure to be of wide interest to American- and transportation-history buffs.
A bureaucrat blunders, and hundreds die.
Now that no one is left who witnessed the event and its aftermath, the case of the steamboat General Slocum has become a footnote in New York history. Here, O’Donnell (History/Holy Cross College) restores it to memory by finding themes that could just as well come from today’s front page: official misdeeds meet ordinary carelessness, and disaster ensues. In the case of the General Slocum, this played out so: a marvel of its time on being commissioned in 1891, the ship had been dwarfed by other oceangoing vessels and become a second-tier vehicle only a decade later. In an apparent effort to save money, no one had thought to maintain its life preservers, something that the safety inspector, only five months on the job, had failed to notice; had he handled one of them, O’Donnell writes, the inspector “surely would have noticed that the once-solid chunks of cork in them had been reduced to useless dust, with the buoyancy of dirt.” Fire of unknown origin swept the ship shortly after a crowd of mostly German, mostly church-affiliated travelers had boarded it for a leisurely excursion from Manhattan to Long Island; within a few minutes on June 15, 1904, lacking any means of saving themselves, 1,021 had died. It was, O’Donnell writes, the worst tragedy in New York history up until the events of September 11, 2001. O’Donnell follows the story through the official inquest, which scapegoated the blameless captain, and into the years of WWI, which “eradicated sympathy for anything German, including the innocent victims of the General Slocum fire.”
Strong material met with solid storytelling: sure to be of wide interest to American- and transportation-history buffs.Pub Date: June 10, 2003
ISBN: 0-7679-0905-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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
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