A wonderfully colorful and inviting paean to Cocoa Beach surfing.
An anecdotal history of surfing along Florida’s Atlantic coast.
Reiter opens his nonfiction debut with a sensual, almost elemental summary of the basic allure of surfing: “The coconut smell of surf wax, a wetsuit drip-drying in the sun, coffee vapor mingling with salt mist, the gleam and crackle of an outside set on a windless morning.” The author’s decades of enthusiastic surfing have left their mark on him: “Twenty years of brine, of salt marinade, of inhaling the sea’s musk, have permanently transformed me.” Reiter’s book, a collection of essays and vignettes on various aspects of this transformation and the activity that caused it, takes readers from the deep history of surfing to his own personal history with the sport to the deep connection between surfing and the Cocoa Beach area of Florida’s Brevard County. The loose structure of his narrative allows for frequent digressions about the eccentric people who populate the surfing world and the natural landscape of Cocoa Beach, with glances at remarkable weather events like Hurricane Frances (“a mere Category 2 at impact, but it was massive, and punishingly slow”). He intersperses comical asides about zany surfers or inept day-trippers (“easily the most abundant of all nonlocal species”) with broader social observations about Cocoa Beach, which bills itself as “a tropical, quaintly parochial town” that has nevertheless been home to some of the greatest surfers in the sport’s history. The author writes with warm, knowing affection for his cast of characters, including Kelly Slater, “the man who revolutionized a millennia-old sport” who’s dubbed by Reiter “the greatest surfer of all time.” The author does a thrilling job narrating the action of surfing big waves, but the main strength of the book is Reiter’s heartfelt appreciation of the natural world of the sport, the “brief Orphic hours” when Cocoa Beach surfers commune with the sea. He’s written a surfing classic fit to sit beside John Long’s The Big Drop (1999) and William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days (2015).
A wonderfully colorful and inviting paean to Cocoa Beach surfing.Pub Date: April 29, 2025
ISBN: 9780813080970
Page Count: 174
Publisher: Univ. Press of Florida
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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