Soggy with mysticism and openly contemptuous of contemporary civilization, but still Waterman remains a charming, if...
A kayaker’s lonely but ultimately uplifting diary of a 2,200-mile solo exploration of the Arctic Circle’s fabled Northwest Passage, and of the varied Inuit inhabitants he met along the way.
Seeking to prove his mettle, make a television documentary, and learn more about the lives of the Inuit, seasoned outdoorsman Waterman (A Most Hostile Mountain, 1997, etc.) packs up his kayak, a Global Positioning Satellite transponder, food, changes of clothes, a few flare guns, and some ancient shaman’s stones to spend three consecutive summers (he spent the winters at home in Colorado) paddling and sometimes dragging his boat and sled across the top of Canada into Alaska. An experienced kayaker, the author used his modified version of the ancient Inuit craft to probe a surreally unforgiving landscape of marauding bears and mosquitos so thirsty they can drain a man of his blood in a matter of hours. He lingers for days at a time with hospitable but intensely private groups of Inuit, whose fragile ecosystem and peculiar oral culture have been nearly destroyed by incursions of both rapacious and well-meaning kabloona (“bushy-eyebrows,” Inuit slang for Caucasians). When not suffering bouts of hydrothermia and nagiarneq (“kayak angst,” a madness that comes from being too often literally and metaphorically at sea), the author’s encounters with the Inuit are mostly positive, and he ends up mourning the terrible consequences of disease, alcohol, pollution, inept environmental rulings, oil exploitation, and other misguided kabloona concerns on a people he finds noble but in no way savage.
Soggy with mysticism and openly contemptuous of contemporary civilization, but still Waterman remains a charming, if occasionally bumbling, host on a stirring outdoor adventure. (104 photos and illustrations, with 8 color pages, not seen)Pub Date: April 6, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-40409-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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