A story of infrastructure told on a human scale and a trenchant reminder that the modern metropolis comes with high risks...
Sprawling account of a preventable tragedy during the gigantic cleanup of Boston Harbor.
Boston Globe Magazine staff writer Swidey (Journalism/Tufts Univ.; The Assist: Hoops, Hope, and the Game of Their Lives, 2008) tackles an obscure topic with precision, looking at the little-known field of commercial diving and its otherworldly environs. In 1999, a small crew of divers was recruited to solve a minor-seeming problem; after nearly a decade of tunneling deep under the harbor, the mammoth Deer Island sewage-treatment tunnel was completed, except for the removal of 55 “safety plugs” that had protected the tunnel builders from flooding prior to the removal of the tunnel’s ventilation system. At this point, there were so many construction corporations and governmental entities involved that, after extensive disagreement on the best way to remove the plugs, the task was subcontracted to two small diving companies and a socially awkward whiz-kid engineer who considered himself an expert in hazardous dives. Yet, the engineer foisted upon the divers a jury-rigged air delivery system that a state police investigator later thought resembled “an eighth-grade science fair project gone horribly wrong.” Two divers died, and three more barely escaped from the tunnel’s airless atmosphere. In the prologue, Swidey sketches the flash-point moment when the divers’ system failed and then skillfully builds suspense, showing the development and gradual unraveling of the complicated plan. The author leisurely builds his characters’ back stories, contrasting the ambitions and eccentricities of both roughneck divers and the hard-charging “suits” who were simultaneously under court order to finish the project and determined to minimize their liabilities. Remarkably, despite investigators’ recommendations, neither the cocksure engineer (who “had shown willful disregard for the lives of the divers”) nor anyone else was held liable for the deaths. Swidey delves enthusiastically into the minutiae of law, diving, public works and worker safety under extreme circumstances. The complicated narrative sustains interest despite occasional meandering.
A story of infrastructure told on a human scale and a trenchant reminder that the modern metropolis comes with high risks and savage costs.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-307-88672-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
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 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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