An absorbing account of a physically and spiritually challenging journey.
A wild and forbidding terrain reveals its dramatic history.
Vancouver-based travel writer Antonson (Full Moon Over Noah’s Ark: An Odyssey to Mount Ararat and Beyond, 2016, etc.) vividly recounts a two-week, 60-mile journey on the formidable Kokoda Trail in Papua New Guinea, a rugged terrain marked by jungle, bogs, gullies, cliffs, malarial mosquitoes, rigorous ascents, and steep, slippery descents. After accepting a neighbor’s invitation to go on the trek, the author discovered some unsettling rumors about the region: Crime was rampant, gangs marauded, and hostile native tribes were known to attack. Port Moresby, where the walk would start, had been ranked “among the world’s most unlivable cities.” But the chance to see breathtaking vistas, “awe-inspiring foliage,” and sites known only to Papuans and trekkers lured him. “If the demands of the trek didn’t kill us (as they had others in recent years),” writes the author, “we’d have the trip of a lifetime.” In preparation for the arduous demands of the hike, he and his neighbor practiced power-walking on sand and climbing steep hills in the Australian rainforest; he made sure all his vaccinations were up to date; and, to sate his curiosity, read up on Papua’s history. Papua, the world’s second-largest island, had been a critical battleground during World War II, “the lynchpin” that decisively foiled Japan’s plan to position itself to attack Australia. Although many battlefields change over time, the Kokoda Trail “was almost identical now to then” and evoked a clear sense of its violent past. Antonson and his party of trekkers and porters found unexploded bombs, rusted Japanese hand grenades, chipped helmets, and shallow foxholes. With the ghosts of Japanese, American, Papuan, and Australian soldiers always hovering, the author had a palpable sense of “the dismay their earthly beings must have felt in all of this.” As intensely as he responded to the natural surroundings, he also felt a growing disgust with “war’s inherent vulgarities.”
An absorbing account of a physically and spiritually challenging journey.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5107-0566-1
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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