Those who relish tales of the rich and famous will appreciate this book, but the real joy is in the authors’ detective work...
On the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Lusitania, King and Wilson (The Resurrection of the Romanovs: Anastasia, Anna Anderson, and the World's Greatest Royal Mystery, 2010) dig for clues to unanswered questions.
The details surrounding how the elusive information disappeared uncover guilt on all sides. The British Admiralty had to protect the fact that they were transporting contraband in a ship sailing without a flag. The local coroner’s inquest, the British Board of Trade’s hearing and a U.S. District Court all dismissed charges of negligence. The admiralty never sent escort to protect the Lusitania as she entered British waters, and the captain acted contrary to orders. Even the journal of the U-boat captain has been altered. Did he fire one or two torpedoes? The German government published a warning as the Lusitania was about to sail from New York, proclaiming that ships misusing neutral flags found in British waters would be subject to destruction. Prior to this statement, the “Cruiser Rules” codified by The Hague in 1899 required enemy ships to give warning, demand a search for contraband and allow the ship to be abandoned before sinking it. In January 1915, England ordered her merchant vessels to sail under false flags and carry munitions, knowing Germany would respond in kind. First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill referred to the Lusitania as “live bait,” hoping to draw the Americans into the war. The ship was the last of the great Edwardian ships, as her upper-class passengers showed, some of whom had actually been warned by Germans not to sail. The authors devote inordinate portions of the text to biographies of passengers and still more to the lives of the survivors, but their exploration of the facts surrounding the mystery is the primary pleasure of the book.
Those who relish tales of the rich and famous will appreciate this book, but the real joy is in the authors’ detective work and attention to detail.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-05254-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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 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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