A well-told adventure.
Meticulous chronicle of perhaps the most audacious pirate raid in history.
On the Caribbean side of the Audiencia of Panamá, the city of Portobello welcomed Spanish ships carrying manufactured goods critical to the West Indian empire’s maintenance. On the Pacific side of the narrow isthmus lay the city of Panamá, where ships laden with silver from Peru off-loaded their treasure onto mule trains headed to Portobello for galleons returning to Spain. By 1666, it had been almost 70 years since English privateer Francis Drake had seriously threatened the area’s security. In the meantime, her treasury drained by incessant war and the cost of servicing her far-flung colonies, Spain’s power waned, her vigilance relaxed and her defense of the Caribbean grew thin and rusty. From his base on Jamaica, Privateer Henry Morgan noticed. Taking full advantage of Spanish decay and the vast distances and slow communications that allowed him to ignore whatever peace agreement Europe had concluded, Morgan (making sly use of commissions issued by Jamaica’s governor, Thomas Modyford, that lent legal cover to his operations) brought Spain to her knees. Earle (Economic History/Univ. of London; The Pirate Wars, 2005, etc.) focuses on the five-year period featuring a series of pirate attacks and Spanish counterthrusts that culminated in the audacious 1671 raid on Portobello and the looting of Panamá, which cemented Morgan’s reputation as history’s greatest pirate commander, whose effectiveness was exceeded only by his brutality. Relying mostly on letters, reports and legal documents, the author has pieced together a fascinating tale that’s especially strong in recounting the Spaniards’ mostly hapless response to Morgan’s depredations and in delineating how piracy thrived within the interstices of law and diplomacy. Earle also explains why, once launched on their dubious missions, irregular forces of men who thought nothing of rape, torture or any despicable tactic to gain their objective, nonetheless strictly adhered to self-made codes of conduct and elaborate conventions that governed the division of spoils.
A well-told adventure.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2007
ISBN: 0-312-36142-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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