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WHAT AM I DOING HERE?

TRUE ADVENTURES WHILE SURVIVING 1172 DAYS IN THE U.S. ARMY DURING WWII

A valuable addition to ground-level history, caught with a keen eye even while Maleck was ducking his head.

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Maleck presents a lively, chromatic memoir of his days as a medic in the European theater of WWII.

In these reminiscences, Maleck tries hard to be a regular Joe, just another guy doing his bit for the war effort. His writing can be willfully unvarnished—“I actually ‘conked’ out and fell into one of our chests and fell asleep, and nobody gave a ‘damn’!”—and there are grating stylistic tics (such as using “that” for “who”), but these quirks don’t diminish his thoughtfulness and talent to recall frontline events in all their wicked immediacy. Here is a man who landed in France shortly after D-Day and engaged in the bitterest of combat—think of the freezing, murderous misery of the Battle of the Bulge—as a medic, moving from body to body, trying to keep infantrymen alive after they had been physically and mentally shredded. He was unarmed, as was the case with medics; his armband was supposed to protect him, but often served as a target. That kept him bright and alert, making him especially alive to circumstance—not just the fighting, but the lay of the land, the weather, what the brass hoped to achieve at any given moment, the full picture of what was before him. His memory has kept that keenness and re-creates it here in the close combat (“room to room fighting, pistols, bayonets, fists”), the blazing towns his company passed through in Belgium, the absurdly close calls that, one micrometer this way or that, would have ended his life. And in the best tradition of the survivor, he has a sense of humor,  if of the blackest sort—“Though we called them ‘foxholes,’ each time you entered or left it, the similarity of your handiwork and what a gravedigger is hired to do is very noteworthy.” As this book is an ongoing memoir project, Maleck has included a sweet tribute to a family dog, a terrier-whippet mix known as Speed—affectionate watchdog-companion-hunter—which amplifies Maleck’s warmth of humanity and spirit.

A valuable addition to ground-level history, caught with a keen eye even while Maleck was ducking his head.

Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2009

ISBN: 978-1438979076

Page Count: 292

Publisher: AuthorHouse

Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2011

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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.

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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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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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