by A.J. Langguth ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 15, 2000
A grimly powerful procession of folly and tragedy.
An epic account of America’s involvement in Vietnam by a historian who covered much of the war for the New York Times.
Langguth (A Noise of War, 1994, etc.) uses the same technique he employed in his previous military histories: a painstakingly constructed narrative described through the eyes of participants. In the case of Vietnam, he has the advantage of having witnessed the events himself, and he was also able to interview various policymakers (from Saigon, Hanoi, and Washington) who plotted the course of the war, as well as to examine thousands of declassified documents. The result is a revision of the Vietnam revisionists—those who would argue that the war could have been won if the US had been able to commit all its resources and an unrelenting will to the war effort. The major events of the period are all here: the 1954 collapse of French control over its former colony at Diên Biên Phú; the flawed leadership of Ngo Dinh Diem that ended in a coup, ambivalently abetted by the Kennedy administration; the comic-opera succession of short-lived, corrupt South Vietnamese regimes that followed; the grueling guerrilla warfare; the My Lai massacre; the stop-and-start attempts at peace negotiations; and, finally, the April 1975 Communist takeover. A sprawling cast of characters is revealed with complexity and, sometimes, great sympathy: North Vietnamese Communists, as resentful toward their Chinese and Soviet allies as toward their American foes; American political and military leaders, starting out ignorant of the inept and corrupt regime they back, increasingly certain that the war effort is doomed, but thrashing about in the quagmire for craven electoral considerations; and common soldiers on all sides, enduring harrowing conditions and often fighting heroically for years.
A grimly powerful procession of folly and tragedy.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-81202-9
Page Count: 784
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2000
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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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
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