by James Tertius DeKay ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2001
Good entertainment for fans of Civil War tales, naval history, or true stories of high-seas adventure.
The little-known story of the clandestine British construction of a Confederate warship, Southern piracy, and the far-reaching impact these activities had on modern international law.
Naval historian deKay (Monitor, 1997, etc.) finds political intrigue, swashbuckling adventure, and the seeds of 20th-century diplomatic agreements in his new history of the Civil War high seas. According to deKay, the tight Union blockade of Confederate states forced the rebel government to seek novel ways to export cotton and thereby fund the war. To arrange for the construction of warships in England, Jefferson Davis decided to dispatch James Bulloch, a Southern sympathizer, successful New York sea captain, and maritime businessman. The author follows the efforts of Charles Adams, the American minister in London, to catch the British illegally providing vessels to the Confederacy. Adams hired a battalion of private detectives and agents to follow Bulloch, who managed to deliver the CSS Alabama to captain Raphael Semmes despite their best efforts. In addition to being fanatically committed to the rebellion, deKay notes, Semmes was a natural at piracy: as soon as he received the Alabama, he began a campaign of terror on commercial sea trade, single-handedly capturing and burning more than 60 American vessels and forcing the US navy to send 25 warships away from blockade duty to search for him. The author concludes by analyzing American attempts to attain a retribution settlement from the British, noting that while Semmes and the Alabama may be best remembered for their Civil War exploits, their real legacy lies in establishing a precedent for resolving international disputes. In this case, an international tribunal adjudicated in favor of the American complaints and successfully compelled Britain to pay some ten million dollars in damages to American shipping interests.
Good entertainment for fans of Civil War tales, naval history, or true stories of high-seas adventure.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-345-43182-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2002
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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 Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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