For fans of Patrick O’Brian or C.S. Forester who crave true stories of high adventure in Nelson’s navy—although many of...
A historical study of the fighting officers and sailors who served in Great Britain’s powerful navy during the golden age of Admiral Horatio Nelson.
Woodman, best known as an author of historical maritime novels (The Guineaman, 2000, etc.), seems a promising choice to produce a naval history of the Napoleonic Wars. Indeed, he demonstrates an impressive grasp of the era. This extraordinary knowledge of the English captains, ships, crews, tactics, and opponents produces a narrative full of authentic details that should help readers encounter this long-extinct age. The author constructs this quirky history of equal parts military biography, nautical adventure, and naval history. He focuses his writing on the age’s most colorful characters, offering readers observations on the tactical audacity and individual courage of captains like Horatio Nelson and Nisbet Willoughby against their French and American opponents. Between the resulting episodes of broadside cannon fire, exploding fire ships, and sea chases, Woodman pauses to describe the domestic life on the ships, teaching readers about such disparate subjects as the ravishes of scurvy and the monotony of sail trimming. He also finds the space to comment on social injustices, shedding light on the impressment of American merchant seamen, and the beatings and executions of sailors that damaged British recruiting and inspired the era’s infamous mutinies. Too often, Woodman loses his narrative thread in this blizzard of data, making the history seem like a series of richly detailed but loosely stitched together research projects instead of a coherent history.
For fans of Patrick O’Brian or C.S. Forester who crave true stories of high adventure in Nelson’s navy—although many of those fans would be better served by numerous, more scholarly histories of the epoch that are readily available.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7867-0855-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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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