A fascinating and engrossing nose dive into the underreported depths of nautical insanity.
How and why the sea has historically plagued those who work and play in its waves.
British journalist and avid sailor Compton’s (The Shipping Forecast: A Miscellany, 2016) affinity for the sea is evident throughout his engrossing exploration of the hypnotic and mentally altering effects of the world’s oceans. In 1941, his father, a Royal Navy lieutenant commander, was thrown from a torpedoed boat, and his fight for survival would psychologically haunt him for decades. It is this very terror and the “distorting lens of the sea” that fuels Compton’s passionate maritime scrutiny. He escorts readers along a globe-trotting tour of some of history’s most menacing bodies of water and the men and women who found themselves at the mercy of a host of bizarre illusions. The author scours the nautical histories of the Strait of Magellan at the dawn of the British Empire; a ship’s log notes disorientation, scurvy, suicide, and madness. Compton also looks at the phenomena of calenture first observed by Spanish sailors in the 17th century, and he explores the suppressed bipolar symptoms of Christopher Columbus and William Bligh in chapters that plumb the depths of psychosis at sea. Other true tales describe shipwreck survivors adrift on the open sea who desperately succumb to cannibalism to survive, as well as the physical effects of seawater ingestion, which virtually guarantees delirium, dehydration, and certain death. Elsewhere, solitary sailors fall prey not to storms or disease but “isolation and loneliness.” These historical incidents also carried with them the enduring social stigma of mental illness, and Compton intermittently addresses this issue while speculating on the true root causes of these “sea-induced frenzies.” Though relaxation and thalassotherapy are just a few of the touted benefits of oceanic waters, the author captures their unsavory capacity to haunt and perplex: “the sea has a lobsterpot full of tricks and illusions to confuse and beguile even the most rational 21st-century sailor.”
A fascinating and engrossing nose dive into the underreported depths of nautical insanity.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4729-4112-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Adlard Coles Nautical/Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
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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