An adrenaline-pumping, thoroughly readable tale.
Three men fight for their lives after their boat sinks during a fishing trip.
Three middle-aged buddies go out for a fishing trip in Louisiana, never imagining the crisis about to unfold when their new boat suddenly sinks. Best-selling adventure writer Tougias (Fatal Forecast, The Finest Hours, etc.) expertly weaves a gripping narrative of their perilous brush with death. The day starts with a litany of common mistakes, from failing to tell family where they are headed and when they’ll return, to not checking if the life vests on board will fit. Indeed, one man is left wrangling a child-sized life vest that become unexpectedly crucial to his survival when a shark leaps at his face and takes a bite out the foam preserver instead. “The ill-fitting vest likely saved his life,” Tougias writes. “Foam is now spilling out of it and into the sea.” Interspersing historical details about other people who’ve been lost at sea adds depth to the narrative, and readers are bound to come away with tips for making their own future outings safer as a result. At times, the author’s descriptions of characters tend toward vague, broad-brush depictions, even the occasional cliche. But elsewhere, Tougias delivers action-driven detail at a speedy clip: the relentless jellyfish stings to the men’s legs and testicles, the thirst and delirium, the dark shadows of sharks circling beneath as blood spurts from a man’s wound, the long hours adrift in the gray-green water, the 10-foot “snarling breakers.” Through the eyes of three regular men who experience an extraordinary test of their will to live, the reader gets an up-close view of the realm “where the pain of living becomes greater than the fear of dying.”
An adrenaline-pumping, thoroughly readable tale.Pub Date: June 23, 2026
ISBN: 9781250406224
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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