Entertaining fireworks during the early days of flight.
A dramatic account of the massive 1919 cross-country air race, “the likes of which the world had never seen.”
In his debut, journalist Lancaster, a former Washington Post foreign correspondent, focuses on Army Gen. Billy Mitchell (1879-1936), who rose to command all air combat units in France during World War I and returned after the armistice to fiercely advocate for an expansion of America’s air power, a campaign that included organizing the great air race. At the time, airplanes were built with fragile wood and fabric, with open cockpits, unreliable engines with a range of 150-200 miles, no navigation aids more complex than a compass, and no parachutes. The U.S. airmail service was already a year old, despite a litany of disasters, and air races attracted large crowds and media attention. Only months before the big race, Mitchell had overseen a widely publicized competition in which 40 planes flew between New York and Toronto. With only a few weeks’ notice, he announced a round-trip race across the continent, leaving from either Long Island or San Francisco. There followed a mass of publicity and torrent of applicants, mostly ex- or current airmen. In this well-researched text, Lancaster delivers an expert description of the planes (mostly ex–WWI fighters) and biographies of the volunteers, and he devotes more than half of the story to the precise details of the race. Primitive aircraft and unreliable weather forecasting, combined with the flyers’ fierce competitiveness, proved a deadly combination. More than 50 planes crashed; some were repaired and flew on, but nine men died. The media praised the courage of the participants, and while writers claimed that it sped technical and commercial progress, Lancaster quotes some skeptics. He agrees that it marked the beginning of a new age and ends with a lively, occasionally gruesome history of early cross-country airmail and the not terribly pertinent but still intriguing story of Mitchell’s eventual flameout.
Entertaining fireworks during the early days of flight.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63149-637-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
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 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
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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