A unique history, unusually accessible because it is taken largely from the pen of a long-dead sailor. No prior knowledge of...
During the Civil War, some 172 feet of seagoing iron, with a deck a mere foot-and-a-half above the water line, made the world’s navies instantly obsolete. That’s maritime history, retold here. The human story, too, is told by one of the ship’s crewmen.
The Monitor, the Union’s “cheesebox on a raft,” was the brainchild of the brilliant, feisty John Ericsson. It changed naval warfare forever, and it changed the lives of its sailors. Civil War historian Marvel’s (Burnside, 1991) text is composed largely of letters from the Monitor’s fireman George Geer to his wife in New York. They date from the time Geer boarded the newly commissioned warship in January 1862 through its foundering in rough seas the last day of the same year. Within weeks of her launching, the Monitor engaged in its historic duel with the Confederate Merrimack (rechristened the Virginia), which withdrew. Each ship’s guns were unable to penetrate the other’s armor. Marvel’s exposition is clear and succinct, as are Geer’s letters, in beautiful penmanship and atrocious spelling. Though his depictions of events occasionally tend to be wrong (elevating routine siege fire to major battles and exaggerating casualties), his narrative of the heat and fumes, the crew’s bad food, and the scourge of Confederate sharpshooters on shore is remarkably interesting, with a mordant wit often evident. His occasional dispirit, his money worries, his efforts to gain a promotion, and his regular husbandly assurances of his well-being (especially after his survival of the sinking of his ship) attest to the conflict’s human concerns. We learn nothing of Geer’s postwar life, and Mrs. Geer’s letters did not survive (although it is interesting to note that the mails went through with more dispatch then than they seem to today). A final chapter deals with continuing efforts to recover the wreck of the historic ship.
A unique history, unusually accessible because it is taken largely from the pen of a long-dead sailor. No prior knowledge of maritime practice or Civil War arcana necessary. (100 b&w and color illustrations)Pub Date: July 3, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-86997-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
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
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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