A careful work of history, useful to students of colonization and exploration generally—and of Australian studies...
Historical documents, intelligently selected, on the exploration of Australia.
Flannery (Director/South Australia Museum) aims here to give his reader “the experience of being a fly on the wall at exemplary moments in Australia’s history.” He does just that, exercising sharp, sometimes peevish historical and editorial judgment in allowing the words of killers and conquerors to stand, so long as they have something to say, while refusing entry to commentators, no matter how famous, who miss the point. (Thus Flannery banishes a certain Mr. Gosse, the first European to have seen Ayers Rock, because Gosse described it as “a high hill,” and not the largest rock on the planet’s surface.) Among the selections are 17th-century narratives by the likes of Abel Tasman and Willem Jansz (who did not much like what they saw—especially the aborigines), 19th-century journals by the indomitable Charles Sturt (who nearly died on several occasions while crossing the interior desert) and George Frankland (who was moved to reverie with every changing horizon), and modern pieces by the camelskinners Cecil Madigan (who crossed the Simpson Desert by dromedary in 1939) and Robyn Davidson (who took a camel train from coast to coast in the late 1970s and wrote an extraordinary book, Tracks, about her voyage). Flannery’s account has abundant uses as a collection of historical documents; it lacks the completeness and extensive selections of Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s long out-of-print but still widely used Australian Explorers (1958), but it better accommodates more the eco-friendly attitudes toward the business of exploration that have gained hold in recent decades.
A careful work of history, useful to students of colonization and exploration generally—and of Australian studies particularly.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8021-3719-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
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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