by Hugo Kugiya ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2005
Solid investigative journalism, though of no comfort to anyone contemplating a tour aboard a factory ship.
An eye-opening tale of a modern maritime disaster and its tortuous aftermath.
Less showy—but less gripping, too—than Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm, Newsday correspondent Kugiya’s account of the sinking of the Arctic Rose makes a sturdy companion. Like that of the Andrea Gail, the 15-man crew of the 100-foot-long Arctic Rose was a mixed lot: the assistant engineer was on the run from the law, the cook a decorated Vietnam vet, the first mate an adept student of the stock market. Most of the hands were young; some had survived drugs to become born-again Christians, others the Mexican desert to enter the US illegally. All were there to make anything but easy money; as Kugiya writes, fishermen in general are “the last hunters, the last cowboys, wage-earners walking the tightrope of waves and storms and freezing temperatures,” 15 times more likely to die on the job than police officers or firefighters, and the Arctic Rose was working the particularly dangerous but fish-rich Bering Sea. In the early morning of April 2, 2001, working an area nearly off the sea charts, the Arctic Rose sank “abruptly and swiftly,” and all aboard drowned. The Coast Guard soon launched an inquiry that would last two years and produce many hypotheses: for a time it was thought that the vessel, “built without blueprints by a Vietnamese fisherman on a rented piece of beachfront in Biloxi, Mississippi,” had come apart in heavy seas, then that a suddenly developing low-pressure front might have sent high waves and winds crashing into the boat from several directions at once. The eventual explanation, it turns out, was not so dramatic, attributed to human error, and the board of inquiry made 31 recommendations meant to improve the safety of commercial fishing vessels. Those recommendations, however, were “just that, mere suggestions,” and soon afterward the events of 9/11 would divert the Coast Guard’s attention to port and coastal security.
Solid investigative journalism, though of no comfort to anyone contemplating a tour aboard a factory ship.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-58234-286-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Tom Clavin ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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