A fine blend of history and adventure.
A British explorer follows the path to True North and runs into a still-raging polar controversy.
In 1909, Commander Robert E. Peary capped his brilliant exploring career by reaching the North Pole in a remarkable 37 days, only to return home to find his American countryman, Frederick Cook, a member of previous Peary expeditions, claiming priority. Newspapers and the fractious polar community quickly took sides and, though Cook’s claim was eventually discredited, controversy surrounding Peary’s achievement has yet to evaporate. Sir Wally Herbert, the first man to make a surface crossing of the Arctic Ocean, in 1969, dealt a seemingly mortal blow to Peary’s title as conqueror of the North Pole with his publication of The Noose of the Laurels (1988), in which he argued the impossibility of reaching the Pole in the time Peary claimed. Replicating nearly every aspect of the Peary journey—copying, for example, his design for dog sleds—Avery (Pole Dance: The Story of the Record-breaking British Expedition to the Bottom of the World, 2004), four companions and 16 dogs set out in 2005 to determine whether the legendary explorer could have accomplished what he said he did. One hundred years after Peary’s expedition, the obstacles and dangers of an arctic passage remain the same: open water, pressure ridges, polar bears, blizzards, frostbite, hunger, etc. How Avery dealt with these, how he mastered the dogs and how he blended the strengths and handled the differing personalities of his team in extreme conditions are all the stuff of a journey sufficiently amazing to require no special prose to narrate it. Deeply respectful of the arctic environment and of the polar explorers who preceded him, Avery comes across as a modest, amiable man who manages to conceal the steely drive his arduous expedition so obviously required. As his conclusion makes clear, the author may need that stamina to withstand the attacks from those still convinced that Peary was a fraud.
A fine blend of history and adventure.Pub Date: March 17, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-55186-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2009
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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