An imperfect but engaging look at early American justice.
A wronged privateer seeks justice from the fledgling American government in John and Nancy Lankenau’s nonfiction account.
Gideon Olmsted was a Connecticut sailor who answered the Continental Congress’s call for privateers to harass British shipping during the Revolutionary War. After losing a vessel in engagements with the British, Olmsted was obliged to join the crew of a British merchant sloop, the Active, under the command of captain John Underwood. Grateful for Olmsted’s aid in bringing the sloop through a squall, Underwood intimated that he would release Olmsted before reaching port in New York. Learning from another crew member that Underwood planned to betray him, Olmsted convinced three fellow American sailors onboard the Active to help him take the ship as a prize. Unfortunately for Olmsted, another American ship—the Convention, owned and outfitted by the colony of Pennsylvania— intervened, claiming the Active as its own and cheating Olmsted and his compatriots out of the reward that was their due. The Lankenaus follow Olmsted’s subsequent efforts to reclaim his share of the Active’s lucrative cargo, an endeavor complicated by the involvement of Philadelphia’s military governor, General Benedict Arnold, whose offer to sponsor Olmsted’s case in the Admiralty Court (for half of any recovered prize money) was one of several profiteering schemes leading to his downfall. The authors further explore how Pennsylvania’s vital contributions to the war effort worked to skew justice in favor of the actions of the Convention’s captain and crew. Drawing on primary sources (including correspondence and court records), the Lankenaus employ reconstructed dialogue to propel the narrative, with mixed results; an overuse of dialogue tags in some passages makes for tedious reading, and some unnecessary details veer too close to fiction. Quotations taken verbatim from extant sources are more effective, and Olmsted’s story is strong enough to stand on its own without creative embellishment. Despite these stylistic missteps, this retelling of Olmsted’s convoluted legal journey, which “offer[s] a panoramic view of a young and growing republic,” is worth exploring.
An imperfect but engaging look at early American justice.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781967311880
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Little Creek Press
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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