A superb, well-researched saga, crackling with intelligence and wit. (4 maps, 24 pp. b&w photographs, not seen)
The author of Killing Dragons: The Conquest of the Alps (2001) returns with another rousing real-life adventure: a chronicle of the determination, madness, mendacity, suffering, and incredible endurance of the men who sought to be the first to stand at the North Pole.
Picking up where Barrow’s Boys (1998) ended, with the ill-fated Franklin Expedition of 1847, the author shows Sir John Franklin’s successors one after another learning the bitter lessons of life and death north of the Arctic Circle. He closes with the passing, in 1940, of the widow of Lieutenant George Washington De Long, who starved and froze to death in 1881 while searching for the mythical “thermal gateway” to the Pole. De Long’s sufferings, horrible as they were, are common fare on Fleming’s menu, along with foolishness, foolhardiness, and fecklessness. For decades, explorers sought the “Open Polar Sea,” a warm lake of water at the Pole that putatively pushed the icecap and its baby burgs southward. Another popular theory held that both poles featured gateways to the inner earth, where civilizations waited to be discovered. Once again, Fleming displays razor-edged wit and an unerring sense of what we want to read. He tells of a polar bear dragging a doctor around by the head. Of temperatures so cold that human exhalations freeze and hit the ground with a tinkle. Of a dog’s tail freezing to the ground. Of desperate men reduced to eating their own dogs—and eyeing one another hungrily. We learn, too, about continent-sized egos, especially that of Robert Edwin Peary, whose controversial claim to have reached the Pole Fleming disputes. All the polar lunatics and heroes are here: Kane, Hayes, Hall, Hegemann, Weyprecht, Osborn, Nansen, Cook (liar extraordinaire, says the author), and Amundsen, each one reanimated by fluid, vivid prose.
A superb, well-researched saga, crackling with intelligence and wit. (4 maps, 24 pp. b&w photographs, not seen)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-8021-1725-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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