A solid bit of maritime history, ably recounting a mere footnote—but an interesting one—to the larger Battle of the Atlantic.
A luxury liner flying the swastika evades the Royal Navy. Paradoxically, writes Huchthausen (Hostile Waters, 1997, etc.) of the cat-and-mouse tale, it made for a victory for the Nazis, and for the British as well.
On August 30, 1939, the 52,000-ton Nazi passenger ship Bremen stole out of New York harbor, cleared Sandy Hook, shut out its lights, and veered north toward Greenland, using bad weather as a shield against what would become many pursuers. For the British to gain the Bremen would be a propaganda victory, but, more important, its seizure would also provide the Royal Navy with a much-needed troop transport ship, the eventual use the Kriegsmarine put it to. The Bremen therefore steered an elaborate evasive course that took it far into arctic waters and to Murmansk, Russia, a friendly port by virtue of the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact. From there it steamed to Germany, evading a British vessel that did not fire upon her, it appears, for humanitarian reasons, inasmuch as warships were not then supposed to sink passenger ships. By the time the Salmon found the Bremen, Germany was no longer observing such niceties, a fact by which Britain scored propaganda points and claimed moral victory in the engagement. Huchthausen’s recounting of the Bremen’s tortuous, 14-week journey has its Hunt for Red October moments, but the drama is sometimes blunted by too much detail, swallowing the highlights. Huchthausen also shares Tom Clancy’s fascination with technical arcana; along the way, for instance, he explains why the shape of the Bremen, both long and broad, and its use of the “bulbous forefoot” (“This protrusion makes a hole in the water as the ship plows ahead, forcing seawater away to both sides and downward, thereby reducing drag on the skin of the shop, increasing the mass of the water at the stern, and strengthening the bite against which the propellers can thrust”) were factors in its escape.
A solid bit of maritime history, ably recounting a mere footnote—but an interesting one—to the larger Battle of the Atlantic.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-471-45758-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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