A gung-ho, breezily entertaining study for lay readers.
An unabashedly admiring reappraisal of Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964) as supreme protector of a great fallen nation at the close of World War II.
Publishing around the same time as Mark Perry’s The Most Dangerous Man in America (2014), the pursuit of the many lives of the five-star general continues in this enthusiastic breakdown of MacArthur’s wildly successful five-year occupation of defeated Japan, a model to be followed and studied. Author and entrepreneur Morris (American History Revised: 200 Startling Facts that Never Made It into the Textbooks, 2010) believes the record regarding MacArthur’s administrative coup in helping Japan recover needs elucidation, from his initial decision to arrive in Japan unarmed for the surrender ceremony of Sept. 2, 1945, to his insistence on sparing Emperor Hirohito to his radical push for emancipating Japanese women. Above all, MacArthur was a keen student of history and modeled his magnanimity toward the vanquished Japanese on Gen. Ulysses Grant’s honorable treatment of Gen. Robert E. Lee, among other examples, hoping to gain trust in his new charges rather than instill fear and provoke alarm from reactionary elements. Hence his highly controversial decision to keep the emperor in power, although he was stripped of his godlike status: MacArthur recognized that the emperor could help “bring about a spiritual transformation of the Japanese people.” Moving swiftly as supreme commander on the orders of President Harry S. Truman yet with powers so vast that he was able to operate over the heads of the War Department, the general brought food to the starving people, neutralized the Japanese military, repatriated millions of Japanese troops and civilians, instituted land reform, kept the Russians at bay and implemented the “Nuremberg of the East” trials. Most astonishing was how MacArthur’s wily team managed to rewrite the Japanese Constitution—with codification of more sweeping rights for women than in any other country except Russia.
A gung-ho, breezily entertaining study for lay readers.Pub Date: April 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-228793-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
HISTORY | MODERN | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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