The brisk true story of a jailbreak so bizarre it might rate an entry in Ripley’s Believe It or Not!
A journalist reconstructs the brazen exploits of two World War I prisoners of war who faked mental illness to escape from “the Alcatraz of its day.”
Situated amid the barren Anatolian mountains, Turkey’s Yozgad prison camp was so remote that no barbed wire surrounded it; authorities considered it “escape-proof.” The world learned otherwise from an outlandish plot devised by Elias Henry Jones, an Oxford-educated British officer taken prisoner when his country surrendered after the siege of Kut-al-Amara, which had left his compatriots foraging desperately for food: “Hedgehog fried in axle grease was surprisingly palatable. Stray dogs found their way onto the table.” Jones teamed with Cedric Waters Hill, a downed Australian pilot whose earlier work as a magician helped the pair refine an ingenious scheme. They used a handmade Ouija board, fake seances, and other types of “spooking” to persuade the camp commandant that he could find gold buried at Yozgad if they left the camp to learn its location from distant “spirits.” After he agreed, they feigned madness in a Constantinople insane asylum and sought repatriation for medical reasons. Fox tells a brisk story filled with colorful background on the magic, spiritualism, and psychiatry of the day. What’s unclear is why Jones and Hill went to such extraordinary lengths to escape when, for prisoners, they passed the time in what Jones described in his memoir as “comparative ease.” They lived in houses with gardens; they could receive mail; and their Ottoman captors paid salaries to British officers. While other POWs’ narratives have shown that captives’ reasons for escaping can range from a desire to avoid torture to a will to bear witness to prison horrors, Fox provides little compelling evidence that such factors drove her heroes. Jones and Hill showed remarkable daring, but their motives remain elusive in a tale that, despite its title, is more plot- than character-driven.
The brisk true story of a jailbreak so bizarre it might rate an entry in Ripley’s Believe It or Not!Pub Date: June 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-984853-84-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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
Gibbins combines historical knowledge with a sense of adventure, making this book a highly enjoyable package.
A popular novelist turns his hand to historical writing, focusing on what shipwrecks can tell us.
There’s something inherently romantic about shipwrecks: the mystery, the drama of disaster, the prospect of lost treasure. Gibbins, who’s found acclaim as an author of historical fiction, has long been fascinated with them, and his expertise in both archaeology and diving provides a tone of solid authority to his latest book. The author has personally dived on more than half the wrecks discussed in the book; for the other cases, he draws on historical records and accounts. “Wrecks offer special access to history at all…levels,” he writes. “Unlike many archaeological sites, a wreck represents a single event in which most of the objects were in use at that time and can often be closely dated. What might seem hazy in other evidence can be sharply defined, pointing the way to fresh insights.” Gibbins covers a wide variety of cases, including wrecks dating from classical times; a ship torpedoed during World War II; a Viking longship; a ship of Arab origin that foundered in Indonesian waters in the ninth century; the Mary Rose, the flagship of the navy of Henry VIII; and an Arctic exploring vessel, the Terror (for more on that ship, read Paul Watson’s Ice Ghost). Underwater excavation often produces valuable artifacts, but Gibbins is equally interested in the material that reveals the society of the time. He does an excellent job of placing each wreck within a broader context, as well as examining the human elements of the story. The result is a book that will appeal to readers with an interest in maritime history and who would enjoy a different, and enlightening, perspective.
Gibbins combines historical knowledge with a sense of adventure, making this book a highly enjoyable package.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781250325372
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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