A gripping re-creation of the catastrophe and the human drama of those who confronted it.
Hill gathers testimonies from those on the front lines in this oral history of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack in New York.
The author, a retired New York Fire Department assistant chief, collects reminiscences from 26 first responders, most of them FDNY personnel, from top brass like then-Chief of Operations Daniel Nigro to ordinary firefighters, recounting their actions on 9/11 and afterward. Centering the volume are the accounts of those who were at the World Trade Center as the disaster unfolded: their rush to the site as news of the attack broke; their scramble to set up command posts at the WTC and organize teams of firemen to evacuate the buildings; and their shock at the collapse of the twin towers, which killed hundreds of their comrades and nearly killed some of them. The focus then shifts to the around-the-clock search for people trapped in the rubble at ground zero in a frenzy that gradually gave way to the somber realization that there were no survivors. Other sections explore the experiences of overwhelmed paramedics; dispatchers who fielded gut-wrenching calls from doomed people on upper floors of the WTC, pleading for help that could not come; analysts who studied the buildings’ collapses; and officials who comforted the families of the dead, organized funerals, and continue to attend memorials. These stories make the 9/11 tragedy intensely personal, capturing in plainspoken, evocative words the day’s bizarre horrors (“Just outside the North-Tower on West Street one firefighter was directing others exiting the building,” recalls one chief, “[t]elling them when no jumpers were coming down and it was safe to run out”), terrifying escapes (“I could still hear the building pancake-collapsing rapidly, loudly, Boom! Boom! Boom! [a]s each floor hit the one below it...[l]ike the world was ending”), and plangent losses (“People I knew so well who I saw…and then they were gone”). Accompanying the text are iconic color photos of the twin towers spewing black smoke, like hellish beacons radiating darkness into a brilliant blue sky, and of the colossal ground zero debris pile, a mountain of chaos under a ghostly ashen shroud.
A gripping re-creation of the catastrophe and the human drama of those who confronted it.Pub Date: June 23, 2022
ISBN: 9781949478983
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Mt Pub Company Inc
Review Posted Online: July 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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