A first-rate sea saga.
The story of a Confederate raider that was still sinking ships months after Appomattox.
Schooler (The Blue Bear, 2001) begins by outlining the state of naval affairs as the Civil War began. The U.S. Navy had enough ships to blockade Confederate ports, but not enough to protect its own ships on the high seas. The Confederates sought to exploit that gap by attacking Union merchant ships and whalers. But first they had to get a ship. They found her in England, where the Sea King, built as a troop carrier with a steam engine in addition to sails, had already proven herself one of the fastest vessels afloat. Late in 1864, Sea King sailed to the Madeira Islands to be “sold” to the Confederacy beyond imperial borders, a subterfuge to preserve British neutrality. Commander James I. Waddell armed her, renamed her Shenandoah and went to work, attacking any merchantman that showed a U.S. flag. Imprisoning the crews and seizing provisions, he burned the captured ships, 40 in all, taking more than a thousand prisoners by the time his voyage ended. Shenandoah raided the South Atlantic, then made for Australia to release his captives and make repairs. Foiling Union sympathizers who hoped to impound Shenandoah for violating British neutrality, he headed to the Arctic whaling grounds, where he captured more than 25 Yankee whalers, 9 in less than 11 hours. Finally learning of Lee’s surrender, Waddell disarmed the ship and headed for neutral England. The last leg of the trip was a desperate race along South America, around Cape Horn and up the Atlantic to Liverpool, a remarkable feat of navigation in the face of raging weather, a state of near-mutiny among his officers and men, and constant fear of encountering a U.S. warship. Schooler does an excellent job of portraying the ship, her colorful crew and her astonishing mission, putting into clear perspective a key Civil War episode.
A first-rate sea saga.Pub Date: June 7, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-052333-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
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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