A lucid, well-written survey that covers a lot of ground—well, of fathoms.
A sprawling, readable history of the world from the sailor’s point of view—and not just on the oceans of the world, but also its lakes and rivers.
Maine-based maritime historian Paine (Down East: A Maritime History of Maine, 2000, etc.) takes a broad view of his subject, beginning in deepest antiquity: “It is impossible to know who first set themselves adrift in saltwater or fresh and for what reason, but once launched our ancestors never looked back.” Indeed, the Americas might have been first peopled by migrants traveling not via a land bridge but by boat, while the shipbuilding industry as such is at least 4,000 years old, represented by a site on the Strait of Hormuz at which ship hulls were found made of reeds, mats and animal skins “coated with a bitumen amalgam.” Many of the great historical maritime episodes figure in Paine’s pages, from Salamis to the Columbian crossings—including the fourth, after which, to Columbus’ shame, he was stripped of titles and land, “bitter that licenses were now being issued to others to sail to Hispaniola.” The author does a fine job of educing a-ha moments from his material, as when he notes the importance of river and sea travel in America’s westward expansion and accounts for the lopsided British victory at Trafalgar by noting that the Royal Navy “had cultivated a psychological advantage based on a belief that the point of battle was to attack.” Fittingly, recurrent themes include the sea as a medium for spreading not just trade, but also ideology, as with the Muslim conquest of much of the Mediterranean during the Middle Ages and subsequent spread of Islam. With so large and diffuse a book, Paine skips over a few things and heavily condenses others; his account of the rise of containerization, which has had so profound an effect on international trade, merits far more than the few pages allowed for it.
A lucid, well-written survey that covers a lot of ground—well, of fathoms.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4409-2
Page Count: 784
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
