Satisfying military history.
Big aircraft carriers dominate histories of the Pacific war to the near exclusion of small ones; this is a rare and entertaining exception.
Early on in his debut book, Canestaro, intelligence officer for the National Intelligence Council, reminds readers that by the end of 1942, four of the six big carriers in the Pacific had been sunk and weren’t completely replaced until 1944. As a stopgap, Franklin Roosevelt, against objections from the Navy bureaucracy, ordered nine light cruisers under construction hastily rebuilt to host aircraft. Smaller, ungainly, overcrowded, with a dangerously narrow, shorter flight deck and holding one-third as many planes, these light carriers turned out to be successful workhorses and critical supporting players in winning the war. Several of their big brothers rest in museums, but all light carriers were discarded and forgotten after 1945. Canestaro tells the story of the Cowpens, named after a celebrated Revolutionary War victory. Commissioned in May 1943, it fought in most of the battles without achieving any spectacular glory, but doing the job for which it was built. The author offers a detailed, bottom-up account of more than two years of campaigning, with pauses for interesting minibiographies of sailors, airmen, and commanding officers as well as the traditional epilogue describing their postwar lives and the mechanics of the ship, which was mothballed in 1946 and sold for scrap in 1960. Military buffs will know what to expect, but general readers, accustomed to military histories emphasizing iconic battles, may squirm at the reality of day-to-day naval warfare. Training and landing accidents, in addition to bad luck, killed as many men as battle. Air-to-sea rescue capabilities were primitive, so innumerable pilots who landed safely at sea were never heard from again. Incompetence was no less prominent than heroism, but heroism was not in short supply.
Satisfying military history.Pub Date: June 11, 2024
ISBN: 9781538742716
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2024
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 Yorkerstaff 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
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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