A revealing portrait of one of England’s most vilified, but ultimately vindicated, adventurers.
Brisk recounting of the harrowing sojourn that led naval commander Ross to conclude that searching for the Northwest Passage was an utter waste of time.
Returning in 1819 from an Arctic expedition that produced no new discoveries or information, Scottish-born John Ross, who went to sea originally as a boy of nine, incurred the rancor of a key superior and as a result did not get another ship for ten years. In frustration, he turned to a private sponsor to fund an 1829 voyage aimed at either finding the fabled Arctic water route from the Atlantic to the Pacific, or putting the idea of its existence to rest. The plan was to winter over for a year, but impenetrable ice near the Arctic Circle trapped Ross and his crew for four years before they finally escaped in open whaleboats to find rescue in Baffin Bay. In the interim, junior officer James Ross, the captain’s nephew, had ventured miles on foot, aided by Inuit natives to pinpoint the location of the magnetic North Pole. Edinger, who has written frequently about polar exploration for Mercator’s World, debuts with a nonintrusive, if not particularly stylish, narrative that ably reveals the stubborn Captain Ross as the key to survival against the odds. Without the Scot’s ability to establish an ongoing symbiosis with the Inuit, the brutal hammer of Arctic winter, along with scurvy and depression, would certainly have claimed him and all his crew. “[The Inuit’s] adaptation is perfect,” Ross wrote in his log, “but we are here out of our element as much in the philosophy of life as in the geography of it.” Mind you, this was written by a man in his early 50s who could find “agreeable” a morning walk in temperatures of 25 degrees below zero.
A revealing portrait of one of England’s most vilified, but ultimately vindicated, adventurers.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-425-18845-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
