A swift, informed and balanced account of Columbus, his times, his voyages.
Two German journalists pick apart the explorer’s biography, paying particular attention to the ship he scuttled on his fourth and final voyage.
As Brinkbäumer and Höges point out, their volume is part of a series of projects, among them a television show and a documentary film, related to the still-submerged wreck off the Caribbean coast of Panama. If that ship is indeed the Vizcaína, it would be a stunning discovery, not just because it is one of Columbus’s ships—the authors remind us that the great sailor lost nine vessels—but because it would be the first caravel ever found. Little is known about the design and construction of these swift ships, which played such a significant role in the Age of Exploration. Brinkbäumer and Höges (who must have had an expense account to die for) visited just about every relevant site in the New and Old Worlds and interviewed just about everyone who has done research on Columbus. They present an engaging synthesis. Beginning with some details about the Vizcaína’s discovery, including the controversy about who saw it first, they then launch into what becomes the text’s substance: the story of Columbus and his four voyages, including careful examinations of the explorer’s behavior as well as that of his men. It is not until very near the end that the authors return to the Vizcaína to explain what happened to it 400 years ago and to explore the myriad political factors that keep it under water. The prose is sometimes breathless and urgent, especially at the openings of chapters. The volume will perhaps prove of most value as a primer in Columbian studies; readers who know only that in 1492 he sailed the ocean blue will here find the rest of the story.
A swift, informed and balanced account of Columbus, his times, his voyages.Pub Date: May 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-15-101186-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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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