This story of Byrd’s accomplishments is for those professionals who appreciate Bart’s fastidious attention to navigation...
Naval aviator Richard Byrd (1888–1957) was a born explorer, but he was no daredevil. American Polar Society governor Bart (Beatrice: The Untold Story of a Legendary Woman of Mystery, 1998) is the authority on Byrd, and his biography is as detailed as Byrd’s own preparations for his expeditions.
The author closely examines the navigational methods used by Byrd, particularly the equipment he developed that changed navigation out of sight of land forever. He is one of the few authors to actually explain to us landlubbers how the sextant works. Byrd’s proficient use of Bumstead’s sun compass, his own bubble sextant and wind drift indicator ensured that he was the best aeronautical navigator around at the time. He was part of the 1925 MacMillan Arctic Expedition. Plagued by the unpredictable and usually unforgiving weather, the expedition fell short of its overreaching goals when the adventurers ran out of time. Eventually, Byrd launched his own expedition, backed by John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Edsel Ford. He planned to fly over the North Pole from Norway with a plane designed by the Flying Dutchman, Anthony Fokker. Byrd was not the only one striving to be the first to fly over the pole, however. Norwegian Roald Amundsen was depending on an Italian-made dirigible to fly from the same spot over the pole, the polar sea and the landmass that most felt existed beneath the ice.
This story of Byrd’s accomplishments is for those professionals who appreciate Bart’s fastidious attention to navigation methods and preparations necessary for explorative treks. For the rest of us, the book is an easy read if you are able to skim through the considerable details.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-62157-082-0
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Regnery History
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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