Let's see. . . if you took all the books written by Isaac Asimov and placed them end to end, the line would reach from Broadway and Fourteenth Street to the orbit of maybe Jupiter. . . . Anyway, this is one of the best. Asimov organizes with determination rather than elegance. Oddly, the most obvious aspect of this subject (the history of Arctic and Antarctic exploration) is the most routinely handled. It's the maze of interconnected physical facts about the Poles that presents the greatest difficulties, and here Asimov is in his element. The climate of the Poles? It can't be understood without reference to the terrestrial shape, orbit, rotation, inclination of axis, atmosphere, and oceans. The Pole Star? It hasn't been the Pole Star forever, because of the precession of the equinoxes. Polar ice and glaciers? The Ice Ages? That brings in the atmosphere again and the problem of how its water content is affected by geographical features, causing different precipitation patterns—hence different glacial histories—at the North and South Poles. The aurora? That involves the earth's chemical composition, the still unsolved riddle of its magnetism, and the interaction of the solar wind with the ionosphere. Asimov is painstaking, clear, thorough (though it must be noted that at the end of a long discussion of everything imaginable about the aurora, he still hasn't gotten around to why it's visible) and as infectiously enthusiastic as a small child.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1979
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Weybright & Talley/McKay
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1979
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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