An entertaining and informative volume that will appeal to general readers interested in military history or high adventure....
Interviews with Vietnam-era Navy SEALs about their elite training and demanding military service.
Drawing on interviews conducted by Bud Brutsman, veteran soldier and experienced military affairs author Dockery (The Teams, 1998) follows up Navy SEALs: A History of the Early Years (not reviewed) with this oral history of the teams’ harrowing combat duties in Vietnam. Loosely organized around the chronology of the conflict in Southeast Asia, the book at its heart is a tribute to the collective spirit exhibited here. Lieutenant Commander Scott R. Lyon introduces readers to the ad hoc nature of early SEAL training, which consisted of qualifying select groups of Navy personnel in any and every military skill that might be potentially useful in covert combat operations. Interviews with other early team members trace the evolution of SEAL training and its effectiveness under the stresses of combat in Vietnam. The same spirit that enabled him to survive Hell Week, Lieutenant Michael Thornton finds, also inspired him to swim his seriously wounded team members to safety during a botched combat insertion. Lieutenant Philip Martin reveals how unsuccessful search-and-rescues of American POWs often turned into important intelligence-gathering opportunities for alert SEALs. A commitment to teamwork and excellence echoes throughout, perhaps explaining how former SEALs from Senator Bob Kerry to Governor Jesse Ventura have continued to serve, lead, and inspire the nation long after they left the Navy. Dockery’s collection captures the SEAL teams’ can-do spirit.
An entertaining and informative volume that will appeal to general readers interested in military history or high adventure. (Maps and photos throughout)Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2002
ISBN: 0-425-18348-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
HISTORY | MODERN | MILITARY | GENERAL HISTORY
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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