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THE LIGHTHOUSE STEVENSONS

by Bella Bathurst ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 5, 1999

A detailed account of the building of Scotland’s lighthouses and the family that engineered them. In this day of elaborate tracking devices like the Global Positioning System, the loss of even one sailor can be national news, so it is a sobering fact that Bathurst presents when she writes that “by 1800 Lloyds of London estimated that one ship was lost or wrecked every day around Britain; between 1854 and 1879 almost fifty thousand wrecks were registered.” Since many of these ships were lost around Scotland’s rocky shoreline, the movement to build reliable lighthouses to replace the few warning systems in place, such as easily doused beacon fires, would seem not only a necessary, but an obvious step. For reasons political, social, and religious, that step was a long time coming, and Bathurst is at her best when describing the obstacles that faced Robert Stevenson (who was the author Robert Louis Stevenson’s grandfather) in designing and building Bell Rock, the first truly efficient lighthouse in Scotland. Three of his sons followed him into engineering and continued to build lighthouses (as well as other public works). What makes this family’s story remarkable is that, as Robert Louis Stevenson said, engineering “was not a science then. It was a living art, and it visibly grew under the eyes and between the hands of its practitioners.” The book, while thorough, lacks momentum, and Bathurst’s pedestrian prose doesn—t often live up to the stories she tells, though there are some striking images here—of the “wreckers” who waited for the spoils of shipwreck, watching impassively as ships foundered, or of workmen trapped in a sea-bound barracks by a horrific storm. A diverting exploration of the art and persistence of this family of engineers. (24 b&w illustrations) (Author tour)

Pub Date: Sept. 5, 1999

ISBN: 0-06-019427-8

Page Count: 304

Publisher: HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1999

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

The osage murders and the birth of the fbi.

by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017

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.

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

GENERAL HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | UNITED STATES | FIRST/NATIVE NATIONS | HISTORY

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BOOK TO SCREEN

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

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

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY

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The Lighthouse Stevensons

The extraordinary story of the building of the Scottish lighthouses by the ancestors of Robert Louis Stevenson

Bella Bathurst | 4.16 | 531 ratings and reviews

Ranked #49 in Lighthouse

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Britain , Family History , Science & Technology

Allan Massie

Becoming george orwell, how late it was, anni mirabiles, over the sea to skye, great scott, a convivial chap led easily astray, a class act, peter pan laid bare, an old-fashioned kind of spy, character building, aesthete with a cause, in brigand country, law by name, lawless by nature, he took the path of most resistance, diary: proust’s progress, pillaged people, even so, he had no right to beat up bibbles, a first-rate education, toxic relations, a writer who needs to be saved from his admirers, ruddy old gore, border patrol, 25 million and counting, byron tells all, much more useful than writing novels, the lighthouse stevensons, by bella bathurst, harpercollins 208pp £15.99.

For everyone who has heard of 'Lighthouse Stevensons' a thousand or more will recognise the name [Robert] Louis Stevenson. Yet he wrote of his father, and it might have been of his grandfather and uncles too, that: 'I might write books till 1900 and not serve humanity so well; and it moves me to a certain impatience, to see the little, frothy bubble that attends the author, his son, and compare it with the obscurity in which that better man finds his reward.' Louis was the tantony pig of the family, who, as Bella Bathurst says, with only small exaggeration, 'stole all the fame that posterity has to give'. Now she has set herself the task of giving the engineer Stevensons their due, and ha done so admirably. It is ironic that she has far more in common with Louis than with his engineer relations. For one thing, like him, she writes with unusual grace and charm, and that makes what might have been a dry book (despite the lashing waves on almost every page) a great pleasure to read.

The achievements of the Stevenson family were extraordinary:

Between 1790 and 1840, eight members of the family planned, designed and constructed the ninety-seven manned lighthouses that still speckle the Scottish coast, working in conditions and places that would be daunting even for modern engineers.

Just how daunting may be seen from Bathurst's

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The Lighthouse Stevensons: The Extraordinary Story of the Building of the Scottish Lighthouses by the Ancestors of Robert Louis Stevenson

Bella bathurst. harpercollins publishers, $24 (278pp) isbn 978-0-06-019427-7.

Reviewed on: 08/30/1999

Genre: Nonfiction

Hardcover - 284 pages - 978-0-00-257006-0

Hardcover - 433 pages - 978-0-7838-8964-1

Paperback - 304 pages - 978-0-06-093226-8

Paperback - 284 pages - 978-0-00-724170-5

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The Lighthouse Stevensons: The Extraordinary Story of the Building of the Scottish Lighthouses by the Ancestors of Robert Louis Stevenson Paperback – Illustrated, 7 Nov. 2000

For centuries the seas around Scotland were notorious for shipwrecks.  Mariners' only aids were skill, luck, and single coal-fire light on the east coast, which was usually extinguished  by rain.  In 1786 the Northern Lighthouse Trust was established, with Robert Stevenson appointed as chief engineer a few years later.  In this engrossing book, Bella Bathhurst reveals that the Stevensons not only supervised the construction of the lighthouses under often desperate conditions but also perfected a design of precisely chiseled interlocking granite blocks that would withstand the enormous waves that batter these stone pillars.  The same Stevensons also developed the lamps and lenses of the lights themselves, which "sent a gleam across the wave" and prevented countless ships from being lost at sea.

While it is the writing of Robert Louis Stevenson that brought fame to the family name, this memorizing account shows how his extraordinary  ancestors changed the shape of the Scotland coast-against incredible odds and with remarkable technical ingenuity.  

• Print length 304 pages
• Language English
• Publication date 7 Nov. 2000
• Dimensions 20.57 x 13.67 x 1.8 cm
• ISBN-10 0060932260
• ISBN-13 978-0060932268
• See all details

Product description

From the back cover.

For centuries the seas around Scotland were notorious for shipwrecks. Mariners' only aids were skill, luck, and single coal-fire light on the east coast, which was usually extinguished by rain. In 1786 the Northern Lighthouse Trust was established, with Robert Stevenson appointed as chief engineer a few years later. In this engrossing book, Bella Bathhurst reveals that the Stevensons not only supervised the construction of the lighthouses under often desperate conditions but also perfected a design of precisely chiseled interlocking granite blocks that would withstand the enormous waves that batter these stone pillars. The same Stevensons also developed the lamps and lenses of the lights themselves, which "sent a gleam across the wave" and prevented countless ships from being lost at sea.

While it is the writing of Robert Louis Stevenson that brought fame to the family name, this mesmerizing account shows how his extraordinary ancestors changed the shape of the Scotland coast against incredible odds and with remarkable technical ingenuity.

About the Author

Excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved., the lighthouse stevensons, chapter one.

Captain George Manby had reached the age of forty without having contributed significantly to life.His childhood in Yarmouth had been undistinguished, his military career nondescript, and by early middle age he had sunk deeply into debt.Apart from an incident in 1800 when he appeared wild-eyed at the secretary at war's door offering to assassinate Napoleon-an offer the secretary politely declined--Manby seemed an unlikely candidate for immortality.His naval colleagues also noted cynically that the only battle scar he had yet earned was a gunshot wound, allegedly sustained while running away from a duel.

The death of Nelson during the Battle of Trafalgar in I805 changed all that.Manby had been at school with Nelson, and although the two had not been friends, Manby still regarded the admiral with affection.When Nelson died, Manby was spurred into action.Inspired by his hero's example and impressed by the public grief over his loss, Manby concluded that his best chance of fame lay in saving lives; in particular, saving lives at sea.It was a startling choice.Manby's only marine experience until then had been an unsuccessful spell as a naval lay captain on a frigate heading for Dublin.The ship had foundered off the Irish coast and, once embedded on the lee shore, had begun sinking fast.Manby wrote later that "the striking of the ship was the most awful and momentous period I had hitherto experienced.The immediate hallooing of all hands on deck; to the pumps, plumb the well, cut away the masts, throw the guns overboard.And amid all this activity, the dismal moans of some, the screams of the women." The crew hurled everything movable over the sides and the rising tide finally pulled the ship back to the sea's uneasy safety.Once back in Portsmouth, Manby reflected on his experience and concluded that the sea and he were not well suited to each other.Instead he applied for a post as barrack master, a position that allowed him to keep his military honors while staying safely on dry land.

Manby did admittedly have good reason to be cautious.Two centuries ago almost a third of all British seamen died pursuing their trade, either being killed by the punishment of life on board ship or sacrificed to storms and drownings.Nearly everything the modem mariner relies on--competent maps, accurate instru-ments, and adequate communication--was either unreliable or nonexistent.The major sea-lanes around Britain were crowded, and collisions were frequent.What is now fixed and understood was then debatable, and navigation was more a matter of art than science.Sailors depended on experience or luck to avoid danger, and when they did run into trouble there was no kindly lifeboat service to deliver them.Until the mid-nineteenth century, it was made harder to assist victims than it was to collect the proceeds from wrecks.Previous legislation had defended the salvagers, not the mariners, and neither government nor shipowners devoted much attention to the consequences of nautical disaster.Most efforts were aimed at protecting cargo rather than ensuring that the crew returned intact with the goods.For several long centuries, lives lost at sea were regarded by much of Europe as so much natural wastage.Accounts still exist of sailors watching slack handed from the gunwales while one of their colleagues drowned.Once a person had fallen overboard, so the thinking went, he had been claimed by the sea, and it was not for mankind to challenge that claim.Such superstition was only an ideological response to an uncomfortable fact: The sea did kill people in great numbers, year after year.And, short of refusing to leave the safe shores of Britain, there was almost nothing that could be done about it.

However, Manby seized on the belief that something more must be done to prevent the deaths of shipwreck victims beached on the indifferent shores of Britain, if not for compassionate reasons, then certainly for civilized ones.The destruction of the gun brig Snipe off the coast of Yarmouth in I807 only confirmed his views.One hundred and forty-four lives were lost after the ship ran aground during a gale less than one hundred yards from shore.Manby watched the ship beat itself to death on the rocks and listened impotently to the cries of those still on board as they died.Over the next few months he began experimenting with possible solutions.He concentrated his efforts on the idea of throwing a line from the shore to a distressed ship, using a rope fixed to the end of a cannonball.Several early versions failed spectacularly: the rope was either burned through by the gunpowder, or, in those rare instances when the ball and rope successfully reached their target, only managed to set what remained of the ship on fire.At the same time he tinkered with the notion of an unsinkable boat.During a storm small rowboats, which were used to ferry survivors from the wreck to the shore, almost invariably sank, either capsized by the seas or flooded by waves.Manby sealed several small wooden barrels with pitch and fixed them to the sides of a small, undecked boat, providing primitive but workable buoyancy chambers.

By the summer of 1807, his prototype mortar line was ready for testing.Until then his colleagues and neighbors bad watched Manby's eccentric experiments with derision.But once he produced something that threatened the wreckers, who took their livelihoods from the plunder of injured ships, he became a more serious danger.As the wreckers saw it, he was not only removing their prized source of income, he was also directly contradicting the will of God.God, they reasoned, had sent the storm that had wrecked the ship that they took as their reward.Any interference was therefore a form of devilish meddling.And so, helped by the knowledge that Manby could not swim, the wreckers tried to drown him.Several local sailors volunteered to help Manby demonstrate his boat and mortar line, and, when the boat was a good way from the shore, deliberately capsized it.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper Perennial; Illustrated edition (7 Nov. 2000)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0060932260
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0060932268
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 20.57 x 13.67 x 1.8 cm
• 1,676 in History of Science (Books)

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ISBN: 0060194278

ISBN13: 9780060194277

The Lighthouse Stevensons: The Extraordinary Story of the Building of the Scottish Lighthouses by the Ancestors of Robert Louis Stevenson

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For centuries the seas around Scotland were notorious for shipwrecks. Mariners' only aids were skill, luck, and a single coal-fire light on the east coast, which was usually extinguished by rain. In... This description may be from another edition of this product.

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A fascinating subject brought to life., amazing places, the other scottish enlightenment....., let there be lights, masters of lighthouse construction, popular categories.

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‘A Wilder Shore’ Charts the Course of a Famous Bohemian Marriage

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As a portrait of a marriage, it’s bizarre. I’m talking about the dual portrait John Singer Sargent painted in 1885 of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson.

Louis, whose first novel, Treasure Island , had been published two years earlier, is captured pacing in a darkened room. Tall and thin, Louis looks every inch like an “insane stork,” which is how fellow writer Henry Adams described him. Louis stares out beyond the confines of the portrait at us, the viewers, as if to share an idea he’s just had.

Fanny sits barefoot on a chair at the opposite end of the room, all but shrouded, like a piece of furniture, in a golden Indian sari. No fool, Fanny recognized Sargent’s depiction as yet another attempt by an admirer of her husband’s to diminish her. “I am but a cipher under the shadow,” she complained to Sargent.

Camille Peri’s lively and substantive dual biography of the Stevensons, called A Wilder Shore , whisks those obscuring draperies off Fanny and restores her to full personhood. But, Peri aims for something even more ambitious than a feminist recovery of a mostly forgotten wife of a famous writer. In her “Introduction,” Peri describes her book as: “an intimate window into how [the Stevensons] lived and loved — a story that is at once a travel adventure, a journey into the literary creative process, and, I hope, an inspiration for anyone seeking a freer, more unconventional life.”

“Inspiration” is something of a quaint term these days in lit crit circles and, yet, it’s always been an abiding draw of biographies. Speaking for myself, after reading A Wilder Shore , I’m inspired to do two things: I want to reread Robert Louis Stevenson’s three great works of fiction: Treasure Island , Kidnapped and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde . And, I want to schedule a séance with Fanny to get some one-on-one instruction on how to live more fearlessly as a woman.

Peri opens A Wilder Shore with a scene that could have been written by Louis but, instead, was lived by Fanny: In the summer of 1875, she and her three children and their governess rushed aboard a train in San Francisco to cross the country and catch a ship in New York harbor that would carry them to Belgium.

This was no pleasure trip: To reach their destination the little band rode a wagon through floodwaters, but Fanny was desperate to escape her humiliating marriage to a prospector who lived openly with his mistress. With the little money she’d earned by sewing, Fanny planned to enroll herself and her teenaged daughter in art school.

Hurtling into the unknown put the 36-year-old, still-married mother of three in the orbit of Robert Louis Stevenson — a sickly Scottish writer who was 10 years her junior. It was love at first sight, at least for Louis. Peri says that:

Fanny likely saw their affair as something that could not last. For him, though, sexual intimacy with Fanny was not simply a romp with an older woman. It cemented his emotional commitment to her — a kind of role reversal that is striking for a Victorian man.

Peri details how the bohemian relationship that evolved between Fanny and Louis included other such gender role reversals: The frail “Louis was what the Scots call a “handless” man,” she writes. During the couple’s honeymoon spent squatting in an abandoned silver mine in California, it was Fanny who “out of scraps of wood and packing crates … nailed together furniture.” Of course, the Stevensons’ union caused dismay among Louis’ friends who disparaged Fanny for her age, her American-ness, her short hair and cigarette smoking, and, most virulently, her olive skin.

As convincing as she is about the progressive relationship between the Stevensons, Peri is also clear-eyed about the fact that Fanny still got the somewhat shorter end of the stick. While Louis respected Fanny as his best critic, he also assumed she would handle the mundane household routine and provide nursing care.

Louis’ undiagnosed illness — he chronically coughed up blood — did have the “upside” of broadening the couple’s life through travel in search of a healthier climate. They spent their final years together before Louis’ death in 1894 at the age of 44, in Samoa. Fanny lived on for 20 more years, writing, traveling and attracting male protégés. No doubt her contemporaries derided her for that, too; but, thanks to Peri’s vivid biography, Fanny has the last fearless laugh.

‘A Wilder Shore: The Romantic Odyssey of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson’ by Camille Peri is out now, via Viking.

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A WILDER SHORE: The Romantic Odyssey of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson , by Camille Peri

A hundred and thirty years after his death, just a few of Robert Louis Stevenson’s books are still widely read: “Treasure Island,” “Kidnapped,” “A Child’s Garden of Verses” and above all his 1886 novella “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” a masterpiece of the grotesque that presaged the coming Freudian era and has exercised a remarkable impact on Anglo-American culture, with some 60 film and television adaptations to date. But Stevenson’s oeuvre was far more extensive. In his short life (he died at just 44, after a lifetime of debilitating illness) he produced a stunning array of novels, short stories, essays, poems and newspaper reportage. His “Complete Works” take up more than three feet on my bookshelf.

Discerning contemporaries saw him as a consummate artist. “He seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his pen, like a man playing spillikins,” wrote G.K. Chesterton enviously. Oscar Wilde deemed him a “delicate artist in language.” Henry James, who became a close friend, judged that his writing style “floats pearls and diamonds,” and after Stevenson’s death he wrote that he had “lighted up one whole side of the globe, and was in himself a whole province of one’s imagination.”

Stevenson’s American wife, Fanny Van de Grift (1840-1914), was a powerful personality in her own right: an individualist who paid no mind to conventional gender roles, a brave and sometimes reckless adventurer who encouraged Stevenson’s penchant for a wandering life, and a domineering personality. Many in the all-male club of Stevenson’s writer friends considered Fanny a termagant, though there were a few, like James, who appreciated her character: “If you like the gulch and the canyon,” he wrote to Owen Wister, the western writer, “you will like her.”

Camille Peri, in her engrossing new dual biography of the Stevensons, “A Wilder Shore,” notes that previous Stevenson biographers have reflexively labeled Fanny as “difficult” without trying to understand how necessary she was to her delicate and high-strung husband, or the “passion, companionship and creative energy that became the life force of the Stevensons’ marriage.” While Fanny painted well and produced commendable short stories for the magazine market, she was modest about her own talents and conformed with the tacit marital arrangement: “Louis’s health came first, his work second and Fanny’s needs last.”

She herself was tough as rawhide. Hailing from Indianapolis, the state capital but still not much more than a frontier town, she had married an unreliable charmer at 17 and accompanied him to the silver mines of Nevada, where he failed to make a fortune and they shivered in a canvas and cardboard shanty. After a few years of tolerating her husband’s profligacy and infidelities, she made her escape, along with her children, studying art in Paris and then finding her way to the artists’ colony of Grez-sur-Loing, where she met Louis (as Peri refers to him), in France on his perennial pursuit of sunshine and health. Louis was enraptured with the battle-scarred, unsinkable American adventuress, a decade his senior.

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