The perfect fireside guide to the ages-old desire to find something hidden, perilous, and fabulous.
Glorious adventure—in the library, on foot, and in the mind—in pursuit of gold hidden deep in the jungle.
Far in the Ecuadorian highlands, legend has it, lies a hoard of gold, silver, and gems accumulated as ransom to save the life of the Inca’s last ruler, Atahualpa. After his execution, the treasure was hidden away in a cave—and not just any old cave, but one lost in the punched and crumpled Andes, home of bogs and bugs, freezing white fog, skewering bamboo, endless rain, bears and lions. Guidebooks and maps, though cryptic and contradictory, claimed to offer sightings of this wealth, and occasional artifacts (which may or may not have been the fruits of the hoard) suggested there was at least a glint of truth to it all. While researching malaria (The Fever Trail, 2002), British journalist and historian Honigsbaum heard tell of the treasure and set out to gather all the information he could concerning its whereabouts. His enthralling work begins with sleuthing in the archives, then moves on to make contact with various characters (shady and otherwise) who have had loot on their minds for years, while also tracing a history of the various expeditions launched to recover the trove. Essaying the Sherlock Holmes style, Honigsbaum tries to decipher the more arcane clues: “ ‘Look for a cross and 4 to L,’ I translated. ‘Yes, but not only that. He said one of the sailors had also mentioned something about a sleeping woman.’ ” He even indulges in a bit of gratifying skullduggery (“first I had to convince him that I wasn’t there to wheedle information out of him, which of course I was”) before launching his own expedition on a shoestring . . . and unearthing little more than a bootlace.
The perfect fireside guide to the ages-old desire to find something hidden, perilous, and fabulous.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-374-19170-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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