A comprehensive, expertly rendered narrative history of Antarctica’s most-visited region.
Owing to numerous nearby islands that aided nautical exploration, the Antarctic Peninsula, jutting 1,000 miles north of the main continental mass, is where humans first explored the last-discovered continent and where most tourists visit today. Similarly, Boothe uses the Peninsula region to hook readers. The subtitle notwithstanding, this book doesn’t so much confine itself to the Peninsula as make it the face of Antarctica, the starring character in a geographic drama spanning 500 years—an alluring but indomitable mistress beguiling and frustrating suitor after suitor. The main title is dead-on. Ice is an ever-present antagonist thwarting all who dare challenge the harsh environment, and Boothe tells their stories with such authority, readers forget she was not part of their expeditions. From the legendary—Magellan, Cook, Shackleton, Amundsen, Byrd—to lesser-known sealers, whalers, meteorologists and geologists, she captures their motives, struggles, heartbreaks and triumphs. Men suffer frostbite and scurvy. Pack ice traps, crushes and sinks their ships. They must shoot and eat their sledge dogs. Those who survive, return, gradually claiming new territory and earning the place-names on today’s maps. Boothe has accomplished a difficult task—producing a historical account scholarly enough for textbook use while engaging enough for a general audience. The feat is all the more remarkable considering this is her first book. Her fascination with Antarctica dates to childhood, and her travels include circumnavigating the continent on an icebreaker. First-hand knowledge is evident, along with impressive scholarship. Literature cited runs to 311 entries, and the endnotes contain (for some readers, “bury” is perhaps more accurate) a wealth of information. Three appendices, a glossary, timeline and “firsts” provide still more information. In-text maps, figures and photographs abound. Large- and small-scale maps of Antarctica thoughtfully placed on the inside covers and end pages facilitate frequent referencing. For those accustomed to browsing glossy photographic surveys of icebergs, penguins and sea lions, this 373-page tome may loom as a foreboding trek, but serious readers, armchair historians and geography or maritime buffs will find it a most rewarding journey.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1587902246
Page Count: 373
Publisher: Regent
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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
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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