Christopher Columbus—heroic explorer or genocidal plunderer? Bergreen (Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu, 2008, etc.) says he was both, and more.
While best known for his breakthrough voyage to the Caribbean in 1492, Columbus returned to the New World three times, discovering hundreds of islands, establishing settlements in Hispaniola and exploring the coasts of modern Venezuela and Central America. Like Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey, he was a master at sea, a disaster on land. Ill-qualified for colonial administration, his attempts to turn a profit by accumulating gold and slaves, assisted by an unruly band of Spanish mariners and criminals, resulted in political back-biting that sent him back to Spain in chains at the end of his third voyage. The story of Columbus’ exploits includes storms and shipwrecks, military clashes, political skullduggery, mutiny, cannibalism and promiscuous sex, but Bergreen fails to assemble the dramatic facts at his disposal into a compelling narrative. Nor does he deliver the measured evaluation of the man and his career that a controversial figure of his importance merits. Bergreen clearly doesn’t like his subject much, and he interjects his own criticisms of the explorer throughout the text without specifying the standards by which he is judging his subject or the facts supporting his judgments. He even frequently reminds readers that, as every schoolchild knows, poor deluded Columbus was never anywhere near China or India. The author thereby becomes an intrusive figure in the narrative, while Columbus never emerges as the powerful, complex and charismatic personality he must have been. Furthermore, the text exhibits a confusing lack of discipline and order. For example, more than once Bergreen relates the same incidents or circumstances twice with varying details and no recognition that this ground has already been covered. As a result, readers will have difficulty trusting the sequence of events as presented. A well-researched but disappointingly delivered biography of a monumental figure.
Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-670-02301-1
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
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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