Deftly crafted history illuminates the nation’s earliest days.
How a little-known member of the Plymouth settlement made a significant impact on its success.
Attorney Mack, a member of the General Society of Mayflower Descendants, makes his book debut with an absorbing, perceptive biography of Stephen Hopkins (1581-1644), who made two voyages from England to the New World. As the author argues convincingly, he proved to be “a key figure in the Pilgrims’ struggles and triumphs.” Hopkins sailed first to Jamestown in 1609, remaining there for a few years. In 1620, he joined the passengers of the Mayflower: the Saints, bound by religious covenant, and the dissident Strangers, Hopkins among them. Because he left no diary or journal, Hopkins has been neglected by historians, overshadowed by his contemporaries Myles Standish and William Bradford. But Mack makes judicious use of evidence to create a nuanced portrait of a complex man—independent, intelligent, “stubborn when he felt wronged”—who took an influential role, bringing to decisions wisdom gleaned from his earlier experiences. Those experiences were dire: Shipwrecked off the coast of Bermuda in 1609, Hopkins became mired in scandal, accused of mutiny, and sentenced to death. He escaped to Jamestown, where he found himself “on the doorstep of hell”: The town was in ruins, the population decimated by starvation, and relationships with Native peoples were tense. The author creates a visceral sense of the hardship of settlement and of trans-Atlantic crossing, when ships were at the mercy of doldrums or tempests. “The wooden ship groaned and creaked,” he writes, and in the dark living area, “the smells of 150 unwashed people and rotting food intensified.” Many died during the voyage. The survivors, their food stores perilously diminished, landed on cold, inhospitable terrain, and attack by Indigenous tribes seemed probable. Because he had advocated for diplomacy with Natives in Jamestown—where he had met Pocahontas—Hopkins, “a cool thinker,” pressed for conciliation and peace. His success in developing rapport and forging bonds between Pilgrims and Natives opened “the door to the prospect of prosperity that came with peace.”
Deftly crafted history illuminates the nation’s earliest days.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64160-090-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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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