An all-encompassing, multidimensional examination of the 1968 My Lai massacre by a distinguished group of historians, military men, journalists, poets, and novelists. Most compilations of academic conference papers are dry affairs filled with essays written in yawn-Inducing academese. Facing My Lai, on the other hand, is made up primarily of reader-friendly transcripts of remarks made at roundtable discussions that were held at a three-day Tulane University conference in December 1994, 25 years after the infamous massacre. Anderson (History and Political Science/Univ. of Indianapolis) has edited judiciously and chosen wisely from the words of the accomplished conferees. The participants included journalists David Halberstam and Seymour Hersh, poets John Balaban and W.D. Ehrhart, historians George Herring and Stephen Ambrose, military strategy analyst Col. Harry Summers, and psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton. Also on hand were two Vietnam veterans who acted honorably and courageously in connection with My Lai: Hugh Thompson Jr., a former helicopter pilot who rescued Vietnamese civilians during the massacre, and Ron Ridenhour, a former infantryman who learned of the massacre and did not rest until the story was made public. The book's highlights include Thompson's emotionally wrenching firsthand testimony; Herring's illuminating essay on the reasons why the Vietnam War was different from other American wars; Summers's thoughtful comments on leadership in the military; Patience Mason's adroit mix of personal and professional reflections on post-traumatic stress disorder; and conference co-organizer Randy Fertel's summarizing essay on the conference's goals and accomplishments. One theme was the debate over whether My Lai was an aberration. Most conferees argued that the massacre was not, as Herring put it, ``typical in any sense.'' But others disagreed, seeing My Lai as symptomatic of how the war was prosecuted by the US. Thoughtful and thought-provoking ideas on a still- controversial topic.
Pub Date: Jan. 15, 1998
ISBN: 0-7006-0864-8
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kansas
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1997
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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