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VIETNAM

A VIEW FROM THE FRONTLINES

A smartly composed, affecting memory album of the draftees and volunteers whose service and sacrifice for so long went...

From the testimony of combat veterans and their families, a military historian assembles a unique oral history of America’s most controversial war.

As the Greatest Generation recedes, Wiest (History/Univ. of Southern Mississippi; The Boys of ’67: Charlie Company’s War in Vietnam, 2012, etc.) offers the sobering reminder that their children who fought in Vietnam, “the 18-year-olds drafted in 1965 will turn 66” in 2013. He readily concedes that the individual stories preserved here are only tiny pieces of the war’s vast puzzle, but taken together, they help explain the military service of a million, largely working-class boomers. Eschewing a chronological or a “big events” presentation, the author takes us through chapters of the Vietnam experience as they unfolded for each man. Wiest groups his soldiers’ stories in sections devoted to their prewar lives, their arrival at various induction centers, their weeks of basic training and their entry into the theater of war. The author follows up with passages on their acclimation to Vietnam, where all learn the dangers of booby traps and mines, the terrors of combat, the hospital trials of the wounded, the changing attitudes prompted by the war’s brutal realities, the exhilarating flight out of Vietnam and the sometimes-rocky re-entry into civilian life. Now, decades after the most searing experience of their lives, these soldiers recall a war likely soon to receive a new burst of attention by a second generation of historians. Sprinkled throughout are interviews with stateside relatives, left behind to raise children, worry about their family members or, worse, receive the dreaded telegram informing them of a soldier’s death. No reader can expect to understand America’s most vexing war through this book alone, but none can comprehend it fully without factoring in these firsthand accounts.

A smartly composed, affecting memory album of the draftees and volunteers whose service and sacrifice for so long went unacknowledged.

Pub Date: April 23, 2013

ISBN: 978-1-84908-972-2

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Osprey Publishing

Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2013

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Awards & Accolades

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  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2017


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  • National Book Award Finalist

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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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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