A technically rich, warmly patriotic account best suited to readers drawn to the technical machinery of search and rescue.
A retired Coast Guard captain describes the massive coordination of efforts expended in the search for JFK Jr.’s downed plane in 1999.
As is ingrained in the public consciousness, on July 16 of that year, 38-year-old John F. Kennedy Jr., then a magazine publisher, lost control of the small plane he was flying to Martha’s Vineyard, killing his wife, Carolyn, her sister Lauren, and himself. The focus of this book, co-written by Webster and his wife, historian Mitchell Webster, is the five days between when Kennedy family members waiting at a rehearsal dinner for Kennedy’s cousin alerted authorities that the trio was missing and when the wreckage was finally located using side-scan sonar on the seabed off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. Webster served as incident commander of the search out of Coast Guard Group Woods Hole, and the book leans on his own recollections, along with interviews with dozens of Coast Guard, Navy, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration personnel. The authors make an effort to introduce the reader to the search’s key players—including a NOAA survey-vessel captain, the commandant tasked with communicating with the next-of-kin, and a veteran sonar officer—adding some humanizing details, but the book’s real enthusiasm is reserved for the hardware: the workhorse NOAA ship Rude (pronounced ROO-dee), which the authors say “could find a dime on the ocean floor off any coast of the US if her crew had to,” or the USS Grasp, “the so-called tow truck of the sea,” capable of towing an aircraft carrier with a 3,000 foot, 2.25-inch-thick wire rope. The prose brims with unembarrassed admiration for the agencies’ professionalism and grit, giving the book the tenor of a rousing after-action report.
A technically rich, warmly patriotic account best suited to readers drawn to the technical machinery of search and rescue.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9781400262236
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper Select/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2026
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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