A nicely handled work that moves back and forth between the two narratives and provides suspense and also a sense of...
A documentation of the sinking of the German U-550 on April 16, 1944, in the North Atlantic and the gutsy American crew of deep-sea divers who finally located it in 2012.
Working closely with the team of divers assembled by New Jersey attorney Joe Mazraani to locate the lost German submarine, crime novelist and journalist Peffer (Screams & Whispers, 2011, etc.) has fashioned an intriguing look at what happened the night the U-550 tracked the U.S. convoy of oil tankers leaving New York Harbor bound for England. After firing at one of the tankers and sinking it, the German U-boat was struck by the convoy’s accompanying destroyer escorts and sunk, south of Nantucket Island—to the loss of 40 German crewmen, although 13 were rescued, one of them the captain, the battle-hardened Klaus Hänert. The German submarine, launched from a U-boat base at Kiel, Germany, was one of the last of the Type IXC/40 long-distance cruisers to be employed by the German Reich, much beleaguered by April 1944 and no longer the threat that it had been two years before in the North Atlantic. (Five thousand Allied ships were sunk during the Battle of the Atlantic, notes Peffer.) The author re-creates a kind of Das Boot camaraderie among the German crew stuck inside the “iron coffin” while also delineating the Allied convoy system and the sense of peril involved in being pursued by a menacing submarine. Moreover, Peffer ably conveys the lures and danger of the sport of deep-wreck diving, where avoiding nitrogen narcosis and oxygen toxicity requires huge, costly precautions that are always taken in moments of excitement or precipitous action underwater, resulting in many deaths. Peffer tempers the excitement of coming upon a “virgin wreck” with the dreaded responsibility of learning what happened to the lost crewmen.
A nicely handled work that moves back and forth between the two narratives and provides suspense and also a sense of compassion for the victims.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-425-27636-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton Caliber
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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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