A stupendous long-form magazine piece masquerading as a book.
The story of one of the most vicious murders ever committed at sea.
On July 8, 1896, the Herbert Fuller, loaded with lumber intended for Buenos Aires, departed Boston with 12 people aboard: the captain, his wife, nine crew members, and one passenger. Less than a week into the journey, in the middle of the night, someone viciously butchered the captain, his wife, and the second mate, slamming each one’s head multiple times with the ship’s ax. But no one heard anything, and only three men could possibly have done it: Thomas Bram, the first mate who had argued with the second mate; Justus Westerberg, also called Charley Brown, an odd Swedish sailor with a murder conviction in his past; and Lester Monks, a young alcoholic Harvard dropout whose parents had paid his fare to get rid of him for a while. Since nobody aboard had a known motive, whodunit? And why? Former CBS News editor Koeppel covers the murder itself in two pages and then tries to follow the crew’s harrowing journey back to port, although there is no definitive narrative of what happened on that trip. Bram was convicted of murder even though strong evidence indicates he was innocent, and President Woodrow Wilson eventually pardoned him. In the rest of the narrative, the author details the lives of Bram and Monks. This should be the stuff of a gripping, can’t-put-it-down thriller, but the book is disappointing. Although Koeppel clearly conducted an impressive amount of research, there just isn’t enough information available to justify a book-length project, even one this slim. Consequently, the author fills the space with unimportant, unrelated details that do little to contribute to his story.
A stupendous long-form magazine piece masquerading as a book.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-306-90338-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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 Yorker staff 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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