Oddly compelling tales of disaster averted, sometimes miraculously.
Dramatic accounts of assassination attempts and other brushes with death in the lives of select serving or future chief executives.
Four U.S presidents have been assassinated while in office, but considerably more have had narrow squeaks, as Spradlin, writing with a sharp eye for colorful quotes and details, chronicles. Most incidents occurred before or after their terms—George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower, for instance, were targeted by assassins in wartime; young officers John Kennedy and George H.W. Bush were likewise nearly captured in the Pacific in World War II; Theodore Roosevelt was shot in the chest on a campaign stop (and went on to deliver a 90-minute speech after examining his spittle to make sure his lung hadn’t been punctured); and Navy officer Jimmy Carter led a crew tasked with shutting down an unstable nuclear reactor (“I had radioactive urine for six months,” he recalls). The author includes substantial asides on the motives and fates of the would-be assassins, significant figures such as detective Allan Pinkerton and his gifted associate Kate Warne, and like high-interest topics. Nearly everyone here is or was white, but though the author’s nods to Washington’s secret agents “Hercules Mulligan and his slave, Cato” are clumsy, he does note that the GIs who blew the whistle on the Eisenhower plot by capturing a trio of German agents were African American.
Oddly compelling tales of disaster averted, sometimes miraculously. (source notes, index) (Nonfiction. 10-13)Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5476-0023-6
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
Bial (A Handful of Dirt, p. 299, etc.) conjures up ghostly images of the Wild West with atmospheric photos of weathered clapboard and a tally of evocative names: Tombstone, Deadwood, Goldfield, Progress, Calamity Jane, Wild Bill Hickock, the OK Corral. Tracing the life cycle of the estimated 30,000 ghost towns (nearly 1300 in Utah alone), he captures some echo of their bustling, rough-and-tumble past with passages from contemporary observers like Mark Twain: “If a man wanted a fight on his hands without any annoying delay, all he had to do was appear in public in a white shirt or stove-pipe hat, and he would be accommodated.” Among shots of run-down mining works, dusty, deserted streets, and dark eaves silhouetted against evening skies, Bial intersperses 19th-century photos and prints for contrast, plus an occasional portrait of a grizzled modern resident. He suggests another sort of resident too: “At night that plaintive hoo-hoo may be an owl nesting in a nearby saguaro cactus—or the moaning of a restless ghost up in the graveyard.” Children seeking a sense of this partly mythic time and place in American history, or just a delicious shiver, will linger over his tribute. (bibliography) (Nonfiction. 9-11)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-618-06557-1
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2001
In this companion to Portraits of War: Civil War Photographers and Their Work (1998), Sullivan presents an album of the prominent ships and men who fought on both sides, matched to an engrossing account of the war's progress: at sea, on the Mississippi, and along the South's well-defended coastline. In his view, the issue never was in doubt, for though the Confederacy fought back with innovative ironclads, sleek blockade runners, well-armed commerce raiders, and sturdy fortifications, from the earliest stages the North was able to seal off, and then take, one major southern port after another. The photos, many of which were made from fragile glass plates whose survival seems near-miraculous, are drawn from private as well as public collections, and some have never been published before. There aren't any action shots, since mid-19th-century photography required very long exposure times, but the author compensates with contemporary prints, plus crisp battle accounts, lucid strategic overviews, and descriptions of the technological developments that, by war's end, gave this country a world-class navy. He also profiles the careers of Matthew Brady and several less well-known photographers, adding another level of interest to a multi-stranded survey. (source notes, index) (Nonfiction. 10-13)
Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7613-1553-5
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Twenty-First Century/Millbrook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
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