A very promising topic, and one worthy of a better book. For now, though, this will do.
What is the most fitting way to honor those slain in battle? These days, you make a speech, fire a salute and perhaps build a memorial—being careful, of course, that no one publishes photographs of the fallen.
That last proviso, writes freelance author Sledge in this sometimes ham-fisted account of American military funerary custom, is an outcome of what has been called the Dover Test, “in which military gains are weighed against the vivid image of dead men and women being unloaded from air transports at Dover Air Fore Base.” In the Vietnam era, television brought us pictures of body bags on the tarmac each day; now, since Americans apparently cannot handle the thought that war means death, the military is at pains to keep the media away “from all places where the dead are transported.” Death was not always kept from the public, though, even if it took the government some time to figure out what its role in bringing the bodies home might be. In times past, that is to say, America’s dead were buried where they fell; only over time did it become standard for the fallen to be relocated to burial grounds near home. Sledge competently describes the evolution of remains-identification techniques in the field, the development of military cemeteries and repatriation methods since the 19th century, and the thorny issues surrounding what to do with the enemy bodies that accumulate along the way; his account of what happens to the dead in situ will satisfy any student of forensics. Yet the writing is clumsy throughout, as when Sledge inserts himself into the narrative to confess, “I had to compartmentalize myself and create some space between my thoughts and feelings and the job I was doing, much like the surgeon preparing to penetrate a patient’s brain with scalpel, rods, and fingers.”
A very promising topic, and one worthy of a better book. For now, though, this will do.Pub Date: May 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-231-13514-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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