Has “make me a movie” written all over it.
Debut nonfiction account with all the ingredients for a rip-roaring guy’s adventure yarn: deep-sea diving, big money, avarice, the allure of medieval Oriental history.
In the mid-1400s, a ship stocked with valuable Vietnamese ceramics sank into the South China Sea. Half a millennium later, an ingenious maritime archaeologist and a sharp-eyed Malaysian businessman figured out a way to recover the underwater treasure. The star of this tale is Oxford don Mensun Bound, host of Discovery TV’s Lost Ships series. Maritime excavation is expensive, so Bound was delighted by the financial backing of Ong Soo Hin, whose interest, of course, was in eventually selling a portion of the recovered ceramics. (The ethical ambiguities of exporting antiquities to other countries shadow this story.) The author, who worked with Bound on this and numerous other projects, here comes off as knowledgeable and ardent, but not self-indulgent. The dive itself was historic, the deepest archaeological excavation anyone had ever undertaken. (It was also one of the most staggeringly expensive.) A particularly funny scene shows Bound explaining to a diving crew used to cruder salvage operations exactly what archaeological work entails: 12-hour shifts, in which the divers would have to be the archaeologists’ “fingers and eyes,” not only recovering as much material as possible but also noting where in the ship each piece came from. The text’s emotional energy comes from the clash between disinterested academic research and profit-driven commerce; midway through the trip, Bound and Ong Soo Hin found themselves at odds. Readers will find themselves whipping through the last 100 pages, eager to know how—or if—those tensions were resolved.
Has “make me a movie” written all over it.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2007
ISBN: 0-15-101207-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2006
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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