A thoroughly researched, riveting journey into the heart of darkness. (4 pages maps, not seen)
Popular historian Dash (Tulipomania, 2000) rediscovers an astonishing, sanguinary, and sexy 17th-century drama of mutiny, shipwreck, murder, and mayhem.
In June 1629, the Dutch East India Company’s ship Batavia, seven months out of Amsterdam, hit a South Pacific reef at full speed. Passengers and crew scrambled to survive and to save as much as they could of the valuables aboard. At this charged moment in the narrative, Dash takes us back to the Netherlands for some background on the principal players in a gory drama whose first act has only just begun. They include: randy captain Ariaen Jacobszoon; Dutch East India Company representative Francisco Pelsaert, the ultimate authority onboard; and apothecary Jeronimus Corneliszoon, an “under-merchant” just below Pelsaert on the organizational chart. The Batavia was on her maiden voyage when she hit the reef and sank. But she had already become, like all long-range vessels of the time, a home for vermin of every description and a fetid community of the unwashed. (Dash gives as many details as he can find about the ship, including her salvage in the 1960s, and he’s lavish with sidelights in Dutch history as well, such as the fact that among the main customers for spices from the Indies were butchers who used them to mask the smell of rotting meat.) Immediately after the wreck, Captain Jacobszoon deposited most of the survivors on a barren, deserted island while he and some of the sailors headed for Java and a rescue vessel 900 miles away. “The calibre of the men on the island,” states Dash dryly, “left a great deal to be desired.” Indeed it did. By the time the rescuers arrived, Corneliszoon and his henchmen had murdered and raped scores of people, but they received justice as cruel and unusual as their crimes in the form of torture, mutilation, and hanging.
A thoroughly researched, riveting journey into the heart of darkness. (4 pages maps, not seen)Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60766-9
Page Count: 25
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
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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