A fine adventure yarn nearly sapped by a gratuitous hook.
An account of the search for the source of the Nile River, mixed in with psychological and sociological lessons to be gleaned from the explorers’ story.
Dugard (To Be a Runner, 2011, etc.), who co-authored the Killing… books by Bill O’Reilly, gives gripping treatment to the mid-1800s Richard Francis Burton–John Hanning Speke African adventure, despite the intrusion of a warrantless theory of traits to explain the human urge to explore. It was a curious mingling—the outsized, egotistical personality of Burton with the introverted, disciplined Speke. But as Dugard presents in this enjoyable re-creation of their hellacious journey, they still made considerable discoveries in the wilds of Africa. Then, their very public post-expedition argument provided another angle of melodrama to the already highly colored world of exploration. A number of other explorers get drawn into Dugard’s picture—e.g., Christopher Columbus, Edmund Hillary, Alexander von Humboldt—and the author has a talent for making even the smallest appearance another gratifying ingredient to illustrate our human desire to explore the unknown. However, when Dugard tries to tie a bow around this company of misfits by advancing the notion that they all possess seven traits, the narrative gets forced into a straitjacket. There isn’t a single explorer, or even individual, who would not benefit from possessing curiosity, hope, passion, courage, independence, self-discipline and perseverance, and Dugard fails to make the case that “[t]ake away one—just one—and an expedition was doomed to failure.” Further, the author inflates his focus to include ambition, sacrifice, “ethics and morals,” creative intelligence and a host of other premium qualities—“Their trick was to be bold, even when they were cold, wet, tired, hungry, miserable, or sick”—while playing down or ignoring altogether the less savory grandiosity, simple commercialism or pure greed that certainly afflicted the explorers at various points throughout their journeys.
A fine adventure yarn nearly sapped by a gratuitous hook.Pub Date: June 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4516-7757-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
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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