A lightweight look at an earth-changing moment.
Popular history of the Wright Brothers’ early success.
Tise (History/East Carolina Univ.; Hidden Images: Discovering Details in the Wright Brothers' Kitty Hawk Photographs, 1900–1911, 2005) hones in on one aspect of Wilbur and Orville’s famous story. The secretive bike manufacturers of Dayton, Ohio, chose Kitty Hawk, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, to test their gliding contraptions because of its exceptional winds, soft sand for crash landings and remoteness from prying eyes. From light gliders they moved to a 750-pound gasoline-driven powered flyer, and in 1903 became “the first men on earth to control a powered flying machine across an expanse of level ground at least a few feet above the sandy surface.” By October 1905, in Dayton, they had succeeded in extending the small jumps to a historic 39.5 minutes over a course of 24 miles. However, they stopped flying in 1905 in order to perfect their invention, sell the idea to the competing military powers of the day and take measures to protect their proprietary knowledge. As part of the sell, they had to demonstrate their flying prowess, and by the spring of 1908 they were back in Kitty Hawk assembling their modified biplane. This time, the world’s press got wind and descended on the small spit of land, hiding in the shrubbery and picking up the yarns spun by the excitable locals from the lifesaving club as well as tales by the station operator of the nearby U.S. Weather Bureau. “The stories were so absurd that the Wrights, when they read them, could only laugh at the wild exaggerations,” writes Tise. Nonetheless, over those ten days in May their unprecedented exploits would be broadcast to the world. Taking a conversational, personal tone, the author eschews even cursory examination of the technology for a folksy approach, which reveals many intriguing anecdotes but offers little lasting insight.
A lightweight look at an earth-changing moment.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-230-61490-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2009
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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