by Sam Willis ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2014
Willis shares his joy and thorough knowledge of the period, and the letters themselves bring it all to life.
Archaeologist and maritime historian Willis (The Glorious First of June, 2011) asked for a seemingly innocuous document at the British Library while researching one of his books. The treasure that was delivered was bound in velvet and gilt and contained the dispatches from eight of the British Navy’s greatest fleet victories fought between 1794 and 1806.
Readers will sense the author’s excitement as he read reports from Britain’s greatest admirals written immediately after battles. This was the beginning of the end of the age of wooden sailing ships firing solid shot. The author’s love of everything navy is obvious, but his greatest talent is in writing about these battles simply enough that any landlubber can understand him. The dispatches constitute announcements of naval engagements rushed to the admiralty and published in the newspapers. They served as the senders’ best chances to color and, if needed, mislead the official history. Willis includes nearly all of these original letters, which show readers the true personalities of the men of the British Navy. Their styles of writing reflect their strengths and weaknesses in dealing with the admiralty and controlling a crew. The true story of any battle between naval fleets is almost impossible to tell. In the event, the smoke and confusion preclude anyone actually knowing what’s going on, and ships are often at a great distance from each other; friendly fire was common. This era marked the last of the fleet battles. Spain’s navy never recovered from Trafalgar, and no nation wanted to waste the money on ships that could be wiped out in a single conflict. “As fascinating for what their authors leave out as for what they put in,” writes the author about the letters, “they remain urgent and riveting more than 200 years after they were written.”
Willis shares his joy and thorough knowledge of the period, and the letters themselves bring it all to life.Pub Date: April 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-393-24314-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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