More intelligent history than breathless sea adventure.
Nichols (A Voyage for Madmen, 2001, etc.) fashions a somewhat scattershot but engaging narrative around the waning days of America’s whaling industry and its crash in the Artic by 1871.
The author traces the spectacular rise and fall of the Massachusetts whaling industry through the success and failure of several entrepreneurial families and merchants, particularly Quaker communities in Nantucket and New Bedford, who formed “the world’s first oil hegemony.” Nichols surveys the establishment of Nantucket’s whaling industry thanks to the good sense and enterprise of a handful of recalcitrant Quakers in the mid-17th century. These independent-minded early settlers observed the Indians’ method of capturing migratory whales on shore, before the fisheries invented deep-sea whaling voyages which essentially emptied the seas of whales by the mid-18th century and forced the hunters to prowl farther afield, in the Pacific and Arctic oceans. In his erratically organized but still fascinating tale, Nichols focuses on the vast whaling fortunes of merchants like the Howland brothers of New Bedford, who outfitted many of the fanciest whaleships of the time and sent them off to the Artic, commanded by valiant captains like Thomas Williams of the Monticello. In the spring of 1871, more than 30 whaleships were abandoned in the packed ice after they were lured by the deceptively benign seasons of past seasons. The incalculable loss spelled the end of the industry, exhausted by overhunting of whales and walrus and disrupted by the Civil War. In addition, whaling had devastated the ecosystem, causing widespread starvation among the Eskimo people. Furthermore, rock oil had been discovered in Pennsylvania, and the cotton mills offered a more reliable, less perilous living to many former whalers. Nichols’s account is packed primary voices—e.g., the diaries of Williams’s wife and daughter, who accompanied him on his fateful voyages—but the historical background eventually becomes more prominent than the thrills at sea.
More intelligent history than breathless sea adventure.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-399-15602-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2009
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.
Jackie Kennedy's secret service agent Hill and co-author McCubbin team up for a follow-up to Mrs. Kennedy and Me (2012) in this well-illustrated narrative of those five days 50 years ago when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
Since Hill was part of the secret service detail assigned to protect the president and his wife, his firsthand account of those days is unique. The chronological approach, beginning before the presidential party even left the nation's capital on Nov. 21, shows Kennedy promoting his “New Frontier” policy and how he was received by Texans in San Antonio, Houston and Fort Worth before his arrival in Dallas. A crowd of more than 8,000 greeted him in Houston, and thousands more waited until 11 p.m. to greet the president at his stop in Fort Worth. Photographs highlight the enthusiasm of those who came to the airports and the routes the motorcades followed on that first day. At the Houston Coliseum, Kennedy addressed the leaders who were building NASA for the planned moon landing he had initiated. Hostile ads and flyers circulated in Dallas, but the president and his wife stopped their motorcade to respond to schoolchildren who held up a banner asking the president to stop and shake their hands. Hill recounts how, after Lee Harvey Oswald fired his fatal shots, he jumped onto the back of the presidential limousine. He was present at Parkland Hospital, where the president was declared dead, and on the plane when Lyndon Johnson was sworn in. Hill also reports the funeral procession and the ceremony in Arlington National Cemetery. “[Kennedy] would have not wanted his legacy, fifty years later, to be a debate about the details of his death,” writes the author. “Rather, he would want people to focus on the values and ideals in which he so passionately believed.”
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3149-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.
A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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