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
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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