The terrifying story of the worst disaster in the history of the US Forest Service's elite Smokejumpers outfit, by the author of the classic A River Runs Through It (1976). Maclean, who died in 1990 at age 88, began his research for this book—unfinished at his death—in 1976. He brought to it his early experience as a logger and firefighter, and his exceptional literary skills. The first half, which crackles with tension, recounts that awful day, August 3, 1959, when 15 Smokejumpers parachuted into Mann Gulch in Montana to combat a small forest fire. Within two hours, 12 men had died (to this day, the only fire fatalities in the history of the Forest Service), suffocated or incinerated when the conflagration underwent a ``blowout'' into a flaming wall of death. In the second half, Maclean becomes the protagonist, as he and two survivors return to the gulch in an attempt to piece together exactly what happened, and to determine whether a secondary ``escape fire'' lit by the crew foreman to save his men had instead snuffed them out. Here, skeletal, mystical prose holds its own: ``As you fail, you sink back in the region of strange gases and red and blue darts where there is no oxygen and here you die in your lungs; then you sink in prayer into the main fire that consumes....'' The history of parachuting, facts about fires—lightning fires, crown fires, blowups—even the death of Maclean's wife add overtones and undertones to the tale. But the basic song remains a dirge, and also a paean to manhood, bravery, and the mysteries of the spirit. Maclean calls his book ``among other things...an exercise for old age.'' It is also an exercise in age-old wisdom—the lesson that suffering is the surest path to truth—exhaustively researched and lovingly expressed. (Thirteen halftones, two maps—not seen.)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-226-50061-6
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
APPRECIATIONS
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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