A worthy tribute to those heroes of the unforgiving Alaskan wilderness.
A smorgasbord of real-life adventures, with an often-bittersweet repast of human tragedy.
Alaska is the largest, most punishing state, with weather, water and wilderness that can baffle or destroy even the most experienced flier, boater or hunter. Its vast solitudes have been raw material for writers since Jack London captured our imaginations with his still-haunting epic story "To Build A Fire." Ferrell has collected 30 real stories of heroism in the face of cold and adversity, virtually all from the files of the Alaska governors' awards for heroism of the last several decades. The author is a steady writer, undeterred by bureaucratic description, and she lets the material speak for itself, writing active sentences mercifully free of hyperbole. Look no further than the individual sacrifices made by some rescuers in these tales to know the real meaning of "values." Oddly enough, Ferrell fails to take note of the many accidents or tragedies here that were caused by veteran Alaskans who should have known better—those who ventured out to sea without enough fuel, packed their planes improperly, left without enough lifevests, took off into dangerous winds, or tried to land in a fog bank. Alaska doesn't excuse such chutzpah, even from its natives. Nonetheless, the effect of these stories of heroism in the face of daunting odds—people battling for their lives in 37-degree water or floating for days on ice floes in the Bering Sea—is pleasantly inspiring.
A worthy tribute to those heroes of the unforgiving Alaskan wilderness.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-88240-542-X
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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