An assured, absorbing history of a disaster.
The history of an infamous shipwreck.
In 1956, in dense fog, the Italian ship Andrea Doria sank off the coast of Nantucket, within miles of its destination at the port of New York. King and Wilson (Twilight of Empire: The Tragedy of Mayerling and the End of the Habsburgs, 2017, etc.) bring to their brisk, vivid narrative the prodigious research that marked their history of another maritime disaster, Lusitania (2015). But where the 1915 attack on a British liner by a German U-boat, killing all aboard, affected international hostilities, the sinking of the Andrea Doria did not even dent the fortunes of the liner industry. Most passengers and crew were rescued; later, many took other ocean voyages. Nor did the ship itself, which boasted beauty, modernity, and a special brand of Italian glamour, have the significance of the Titanic, which seemed a microcosm of social strata and aristocratic hubris. Passengers on the Andrea Doria included a few hugely wealthy Americans, traveling first class, returning from extended European holidays, while some Italians who boarded in Naples found themselves in claustrophobic accommodations. Most, though, were simply well-off. There were several clergymen and two actresses, one the wife of Cary Grant. The authors offer lively biographies of select passengers and crew, setting the stage for the drama that occurred at 11:11 p.m. on July 25, 1956, when the Swedish liner Stockholm, with an inexperienced seaman at its helm, smashed into the Andrea Doria’s starboard side, “demolishing all in its path” and causing “a horrible cacophony of death and destruction.” The authors masterfully evoke the anguish that ensued as passengers—panicked parents and frightened children, among them—crawled across the dangerously listing ship and perilously descended into lifeboats. Within hours, several rescue vessels arrived, including another luxury liner. The authors’ recounting of the aftermath of the disaster—investigation, litigation, and the lives of many survivors—though informative, seems anticlimactic in comparison to the tense drama of the event.
An assured, absorbing history of a disaster.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-19453-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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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