A worthy tribute to the nation’s sea power, as well as all who served aboard the Intrepid.
The official history of the aircraft carrier that distinguished itself in combat from World War II to Vietnam.
This fall the USS Intrepid will return, following extensive renovations, to its dockside berth in New York City where it serves as a museum. It will also likely receive many mentions as the first ship of then-young naval officer John McCain, who contributes the foreword. White, president of the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, and Gandt (Acts of Vengeance, 2002, etc.), a former U.S. Navy fighter, recount the ship’s rich past, beginning with its service in the Pacific, where the Intrepid participated in the assault on the Japanese stronghold at Truk, the Palau campaign and the Battle of Leyte Gulf. She helped sink the famous battleship Yamato and was the victim of torpedo strikes and numerous, desperate kamikaze attacks. The authors are at their best chronicling the resulting devastation to crew and carrier from these furious battles. During the ’60s the ship did a star turn as the recovery vessel for Mercury astronaut Scott Carpenter and Gemini astronauts Gus Grissom and John Young and also served three busy combat tours in Vietnam. Named the official vessel of the 1976 U.S. Navy and Marine Corps Bicentennial Exposition, the Intrepid, after heroic efforts by New York City philanthropist Zachary Fisher, became a floating museum, but never totally left the fight, serving after 9/11 as temporary emergency headquarters for the FBI-NYPD joint terrorism task force. Though the accumulated details sometimes slow the narrative, the ship’s glittering history provides the authors with plenty of interesting stories, ranging from the long-delayed Navy Cross awarded sailor Alonzo Swann, to the flight-deck heroics of the various Air Groups attached to the carrier, to her peacetime extrication from the mud of the Hudson River.
A worthy tribute to the nation’s sea power, as well as all who served aboard the Intrepid.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7679-2989-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008
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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