An extraordinary real-life adventure of men battling the elements and themselves, told with ice-cold precision.
The first American expedition to the North Pole provides a chilling twist on the true-crime genre in this historical detective story by novelist Parry (That Fateful Lighting, not reviewed).
In 1871, the Grant administration hoped that a US polar expedition could discover what 134 European-mounted voyages between 1496 and 1857 could not: the fabled Northwest Passage. The enterprise, the administration felt, would boost national unity, the whaling industry, and Far East trade. The expedition leader, Captain Charles Francis Hall, had few equals for cartographic skill, vigor, courage, Arctic survival skills, and willingness to learn from Inuit guides. But Hall, a landlubber with no experience commanding a vessel, did not have the self-assurance to face down challenges to his authority, especially from the German head of the expedition’s scientific corps. A foolhardy decision was made to abandon the Polaris, and 19 men were separated from the rest for nearly seven months on an overloaded whaler. When the expedition concluded nearly two years later, its crew described a fiasco featuring an alcoholic sailing master, internal dissension, and the more elemental terrors of frostbite, storms, whiteout conditions, starvation, and fear of cannibalism. Amazingly, the only casualty was Hall, who died early on under suspicious circumstances. Parry, a retired surgeon, expertly assesses the medical evidence supporting the possibility of murder, points to the most likely suspect aboard, and details the whitewash by a subsequent naval inquiry. Drawing on government records, survivor accounts, and his own knowledge of the Arctic, he delivers a harrowing narrative enlivened by prose that conveys the full force of nature bearing down on man in sentences such as the one describing Hall’s burial, “dwarfed by the immense presence of the sky, the unending whiteness, and the threatening rise of a shale bluff that towered before them like a crouching beast.”
An extraordinary real-life adventure of men battling the elements and themselves, told with ice-cold precision.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2001
ISBN: 0-345-43925-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
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
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
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