A marvelous plunge into the arcana of Scott’s world—lengthy discussion of the number of calories necessary for a day of...
Polar explorer-turned-author Fiennes revisits Robert Scott’s ill-fated South Pole journey and counters latter-day debunkers who’ve set about cutting the great English hero down to size.
Author of several true adventure tales based on his own various journeys (Mind Over Matter, 1994, etc.), Fiennes brings his expertise to bear as he retells the story of one of England’s most cherished sons. Scores of others may have written of Scott, but, Fiennes points out, none of them have traversed Antarctica on foot, as this writer has. Having established his bona fides, and an authorial voice that brooks no nonsense, Fiennes then details Scott’s first and last trips south. We meet the young explorer as he angles for the role of expedition leader, achieves it in 1900, mans and outfits the operation, and plunges into exploration of the harsh continent. This first journey sets the stage for the better-known trip a decade later, in which Norwegian Roald Amundsen stole a march on England and made it to the South Pole a few weeks before Scott’s team. Fiennes presents this tale of betrayal—Amundsen had set sail for the North Pole and then abruptly changed course for the Antarctic—with an immediacy that gives the old story fresh sting; his way with the telling detail and a sense of urgency keeps what could be a cumbersome retread bowling along at a great pace. The chronicle of Scott’s last days, slowly starving and freezing in a tent just a few miles from a food depot, is particularly well rendered. Fiennes couples his admiring but clear-eyed portrait of a flawed hero with righteous indignation; when he goes after individual authors he feels have got Scott all wrong, the gloves are off.
A marvelous plunge into the arcana of Scott’s world—lengthy discussion of the number of calories necessary for a day of sledging, anyone?—and the many myths that followed his glorious failure.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2004
ISBN: 1-4013-0047-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
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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