Fine seafaring adventure, expertly narrated: for maritime historians and fans of Hornblower and Aubrey alike.
A superb recounting of a strange affair indeed: an incident of mutiny on the high seas that American naval history has long forgotten.
The Somers was not “strictly speaking, a ship, although she was large enough,” a lightly armed cousin to the Baltimore Clipper and one of the finest ships on the ocean in 1842, even though new weapons would soon make such brigs obsolete. She was commanded, writes Melton (Law/Univ. of North Carolina; Aaron Burr: Conspiracy to Treason, 2001), by 39-year-old Commander Alexander Mackenzie, who by all accounts resisted the shipmaster’s temptation to tyranny and instead treated his men with “calmness, gentleness, and refinement” and was well liked for it. His patience was soon tested by the arrival on board of a 19-year-old apprentice, Philip Spencer, the son of President John Tyler’s treasury secretary. Allying himself with a handful of older sailors, Spencer became an adept at goldbricking and shirking, but he was not without imagination: somewhere on the high seas he concocted a plan to take over the ship with 20 hands and convert the Somers into a pirate ship. “Maybe he did what he did because of testosterone,” writes Melton, “the drug that made men become hunters, seeking conquests of sex and blood. Possibly it was due to his parents, one whipping too many, one spanking too few. . . . Perhaps it was simply a mean streak, a manifestation of original sin; perhaps he was simply no good.” Whatever the case, confronted with Spencer’s threat of mutiny, Mackenzie took a possibly reasonable course: he hanged the young man and two accomplices. The case fueled a national controversy, with the likes of James Fenimore Cooper and Matthew Perry weighing in; Mackenzie’s career was effectively ruined, though he escaped charges of murder, and the Somers went on to an inglorious end off the coast of Mexico.
Fine seafaring adventure, expertly narrated: for maritime historians and fans of Hornblower and Aubrey alike.Pub Date: April 9, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-3283-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
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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