by Nicholas Tracy ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 22, 2008
Finely detailed maritime history.
Historian Tracy (History/Univ. of New Brunswick; Nelson’s Battles, 2008, etc.) examines the maritime disaster of the Kent.
Employed by the East India Company outbound in March of 1825, the large vessel was fully loaded not only with cargo but also roughly half of a military regiment posted for duty in India—some 700 people, including the ship’s crew, soldiers, their wives and children. Its stores and supplies included vast amounts of beer and potable spirits, the latter highly flammable. Just several days out, the Kent was hit by a violent southwesterly gale in the Bay of Biscay; the ship rolled so badly that sailors had to be lashed on deck. Investigating the possibility of cargo breaking loose below, one mate dropped a lantern where rum or turpentine had spilled from a broken cask. The result was an uncontrollable fire that eventually reached the magazine where powder for the ship’s guns was stored. By sheer coincidence, a much smaller ship, the brig Cambria, carrying Cornwall miners to a venture in Mexico, came upon the burning Kent. For all of a day and part of the next night, in a still-raging storm, the crew of the Cambria was able, through heroic seamanship, to transfer all but about 70 from the Kent, many of whom drowned or were crushed in the attempts. Some 14 more were retrieved later by another small vessel. The author notes that the episode had an effect on Britain similar to that of 9/11 on America—accounts were republished for years, often as evangelical testimonials. Tracy’s satisfying narrative constitutes the first modern account.
Finely detailed maritime history.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59416-072-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Westholme Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2008
HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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