Another finely etched portrait of a strange, romantic place from this accomplished duo. (15 b&w photographs, 3 maps, not...
The longtime Canadian collaborators (Sahara, 2002, etc.) outline the natural and chronological history of a 30-mile crescent of peach-colored sand that still eats an occasional ship for supper.
Dotted with greenery and wild horses, orchids and Ipswich sparrows, Sable Island is considered one of the great graveyards of the North Atlantic. It sits out there in the ocean’s steel-gray roil on the edge of the continental shelf. Who would ever suspect that there would be a shape-shifting island in this vastness, with submerged bars ready to trap and topple a ship? Very few, at least at first, explain the authors in their glinting profile. The island’s distant past is as foggy as its summer weather; Basque sailors may have been there, maybe Vikings, perhaps an Irish monk in a coracle. De Villiers and Hirtle provide a sweet little geological history of the place, a child of glacial retreat, and detail the island’s special location “in the center of this vortex, this complex system of currents, gyres, and rings” that give it stability but also may spell its doom by pushing it into the abyssal gully to the east. For such a small scrap of sand, the island has a dogged human history, borne of the rivalry between the French and English. A humane establishment was founded there to aid shipwrecked sailors (brought to life with excerpts from letters, diaries, and news reports) as well as to dump a lunatic or misfit or two. Access is guarded these days to protect the fragile estate and its inhabitants—seals that serve as fodder for the elusive Greenland shark, birds, and feral ponies—but the island remains under threat from energy interests and from nature itself.
Another finely etched portrait of a strange, romantic place from this accomplished duo. (15 b&w photographs, 3 maps, not seen)Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8027-1432-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
HISTORY | NATURE | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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