History Maker covers every aspect of the late president’s life, with some unexpected surprises—a photograph of 1925, for...
An overstuffed survey of the life of John Kennedy (1917–63), blending words, images and sounds into a serviceable though sometimes haphazard multimedia package.
History Maker covers every aspect of the late president’s life, with some unexpected surprises—a photograph of 1925, for instance, showing young Jack in a uniform befitting a Keystone Kop, nightstick and all, and one of the president and first lady greeting the empress of Iran, Jacqueline’s simple tiara outshining the opulence of Persia thanks to a trick of the light. The text is light and often glancing: The overview text mentions the president’s service in World War II and asserts, “Lieutenant Kennedy was a certified hero,” without giving sufficient reason for that judgment. This is remedied in the secondary text, but hypertext links to that more circumstantial explanation would have come in handy. The abundant typos in the navigation menus alone (“The Thougts of Author,” “Helen Keller Visits the Presdient,” “Kennedy Kruschev Summit” “Address at Washinton University”) give the app a hurried, slipshod feel; so, too, do gaffes such as a repeated photograph of the crew of PT-109. Even so, there are many good and useful things here, including an excellent portfolio of photographs and a thorough timeline that add value to material that is readily available elsewhere.Pub Date: Dec. 20, 2010
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Multieducator, Inc.
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 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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