by T. J. Cooper ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 9, 2013
Perhaps too dense for casual readers, but serious history buffs will be astonished.
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An exhaustive compendium memorializing every serviceman assigned to the USS Arizona, destroyed by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor.
To paraphrase a famous quote, one death is a tragedy, but 1,177 are a statistic. Cooper (The Men of the USS Utah, 2009) deconstructs the impersonal casualty count of the USS Arizona by penning an obituary or biographical sketch for each of the 1,514 officers and crewmen who were killed in or survived the attack. Cooper’s 30 years as a genealogical researcher helped her locate and assemble facts and recollections from survivors, family members, military records, newspapers and high school yearbooks. The resulting rosters (casualties, then survivors, alphabetized separately) capture the individual tragedies while amplifying the enormity of loss. Each entry follows a template: name, rank, serial number, dates of enlistment and assignment to the ship, whereabouts during the attack, subsequent career, awards and honors, final resting place—for many, the wreckage—and survivors. This format offers a well-deserved tribute to each veteran, but the rank-and-file uniformity obscures many colorful details. Nonetheless, patient readers will discover poignant stories. A retired sailor sulked around the house until his wife ordered him to re-enlist: “There is a war coming and you are going to get yourself killed. But I’m not going to have you moping around the house every time a ship enters or leaves the harbor.” A sailor from a different ship got drunk and arrested on shore leave, then died in the USS Arizona’s brig since his ship lacked one. Relatives reported omens beforehand; others claimed hauntings afterward. Servicemen swam to shore and escaped death a second time when bombs failed to explode. Acts of heroism counterbalanced the searing randomness. Cooper adds historical context with plenty of black-and-white photos, a reprinted history of the USS Arizona, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “day that will live in infamy” speech, humanizing accounts of shipboard leisure, and minutiae about pay grades and dependent allowances. Numerous typos remain in this revised edition of the original 2008 book, though they’re minor flaws in an otherwise well-researched, properly cited and valuable contribution to World War II scholarship.
Perhaps too dense for casual readers, but serious history buffs will be astonished.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-1490964119
Page Count: 586
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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