For the time being, the definitive life of Nelson, though certain not to be the last word.
Even-keeled life of the British naval hero, who was famous in his time for two things: victory at sea, and a long-running affair with Lady Emma Hamilton, the wife of a British diplomat.
It is for these accomplishments, writes maritime historian Knight, that Horatio (born Horace) Nelson is “one of the few historical figures about whom there have been several books in print at any time in the last 200 years.” So it is now, 200 years after the Battle of Trafalgar, with the recent publication of Roy Adkins’s Nelson’s Trafalgar (2005) and Adam Nicolson’s Seize the Fire (2005), among other books. Knight’s extensively documented life is the most complete of recent vintage, drawing on overlooked primary texts such as letters, logbooks and charts drawn by the great man himself. No hagiographer, Knight admits that Nelson’s fortunes were improved by the accident of being born into a family with ties to the highest reaches of government; one influential relative administered his lieutenant’s exam, for instance, and saw to it that Nelson received a good posting. Knight also points to contemporary criticisms of Nelson—he was, for instance, thought to be a hypochondriac and somewhat less than reliable—and demonstrates that Nelson knew how to play politics to advantage against his rivals. Yet Knight also gives readers reason to believe that Nelson deserves his 200 years of good press: he was a brilliant strategist and tactician, mastering such ploys as “confusing the enemy by his feint, isolating the van, and using his three-deckers to penetrate the French line,” and he was able to defeat the fleets of Spain, France and Denmark even while battling illness. Knight charts the evolution of Nelson’s character from ambitious youth to kindly if sometimes impetuous master mariner enshrined by the later Victorians for his skills and independent nature.
For the time being, the definitive life of Nelson, though certain not to be the last word.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-465-03764-X
Page Count: 912
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2005
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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