by Mauricio Obregón ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 23, 2001
Although not without some novel conceits, this seems to lose its main focus early on and sinks like an ill-made vessel in...
This slight compendium charts the most significant nautical journeys of ancient world, providing some modern insights into their navigational techniques and offering up a hodgepodge of mythological explication to keep the text afloat.
The author marshals many interesting facts about how the earliest explorers made their way across the treacherous oceans. Early on in his account, Obregón latches onto what should have remained his central theme: the particular way in which each ancient culture understood navigation. His insights here are original and seem the product of thorough scholarship: he talks, for example, about how the Polynesians had “identified directions with winds whose personality, smell, and taste they easily recognized,” and how the Greeks assigned intimate mythological counterparts to the winds and the stars. He then goes on to describe how the Polynesian star compass worked only in the tropics, and speculates that the Polynesians might well have reached South America despite the opposition of the prevailing winds. He falters badly, however, in his attempts to marry the actual tales of Jason, Ulysses, the Muslim sailors, and Leif Eriksson’s discovery of Vinland. Here, Obregón’s central theme (i.e., the cunning and skill of the early navigators) gives way to an uninspired rehashing of these disparate odysseys. His scholarship treads on thin ice here as well, as when he refers to Thor (and not Odin) as “the king of the . . . gods” and goes on to declare incorrectly that “Odin, the magician, was like Orpheus.”
Although not without some novel conceits, this seems to lose its main focus early on and sinks like an ill-made vessel in the ocean of its own verbiage.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2001
ISBN: 0-679-46326-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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