A keen, entertaining chronicle of the various attempts to locate a sensationally doomed expedition.
Intriguing narrative of English explorer Sir John Franklin’s fatal fourth expedition to the Arctic in 1845, emphasizing the ongoing drive to uncover the mystery of the icy unknown.
Obsessed with the discovery of a Northwest Passage since the 16th century, British explorers weren’t going to give up simply because it hadn’t been found yet. In this engaging work by Vancouver-based journalist and photographer Watson (Where War Lives, 2007, etc.), a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the George Polk Award, among other honors, the expedition by Franklin, an aging explorer hoping to reclaim lost glory, becomes less visceral and significant than the myriad attempts to find his body and the two lost ships, the Erebus and the Terror. In 2014, Watson accompanied the Canadian Coast Guard Victoria Strait Expedition, which ultimately found the Erebus some 168 years after the initial sinking and broke the news in the Guardian. The disappearance of Franklin and his 129-member crew on the Royal Navy–sponsored expedition of 1845 was full of mysteries, and it constituted the worst disaster in the Admiralty’s polar exploration history. After getting stuck in the ice, the ships were eventually abandoned just north of King William Island. A few groups set out across the ice, some men already dead perhaps by botulism from tainted tin cans of food (rather than by lead poisoning, a theory discounted) and others disoriented by starvation and cold. Watson offers a sympathetic account of the Inuit who encountered some of the shipwrecked men and offered them food and supplies, as well as the native shamans who later were able to locate the wrecks (the Terror was discovered in 2016) with remarkable accuracy—if the English had only listened. Watson’s narrative also closely involves the dogged attempts by Franklin’s widow, Jane, who never gave up trying to fund and launch recovery expeditions during her lifetime.
A keen, entertaining chronicle of the various attempts to locate a sensationally doomed expedition.Pub Date: March 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-393-24938-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 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 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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