A fine adventure yarn nearly sapped by a gratuitous hook.
An account of the search for the source of the Nile River, mixed in with psychological and sociological lessons to be gleaned from the explorers’ story.
Dugard (To Be a Runner, 2011, etc.), who co-authored the Killing… books by Bill O’Reilly, gives gripping treatment to the mid-1800s Richard Francis Burton–John Hanning Speke African adventure, despite the intrusion of a warrantless theory of traits to explain the human urge to explore. It was a curious mingling—the outsized, egotistical personality of Burton with the introverted, disciplined Speke. But as Dugard presents in this enjoyable re-creation of their hellacious journey, they still made considerable discoveries in the wilds of Africa. Then, their very public post-expedition argument provided another angle of melodrama to the already highly colored world of exploration. A number of other explorers get drawn into Dugard’s picture—e.g., Christopher Columbus, Edmund Hillary, Alexander von Humboldt—and the author has a talent for making even the smallest appearance another gratifying ingredient to illustrate our human desire to explore the unknown. However, when Dugard tries to tie a bow around this company of misfits by advancing the notion that they all possess seven traits, the narrative gets forced into a straitjacket. There isn’t a single explorer, or even individual, who would not benefit from possessing curiosity, hope, passion, courage, independence, self-discipline and perseverance, and Dugard fails to make the case that “[t]ake away one—just one—and an expedition was doomed to failure.” Further, the author inflates his focus to include ambition, sacrifice, “ethics and morals,” creative intelligence and a host of other premium qualities—“Their trick was to be bold, even when they were cold, wet, tired, hungry, miserable, or sick”—while playing down or ignoring altogether the less savory grandiosity, simple commercialism or pure greed that certainly afflicted the explorers at various points throughout their journeys.
A fine adventure yarn nearly sapped by a gratuitous hook.Pub Date: June 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4516-7757-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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