by Ted Morgan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 2010
A superb portrait of battle and its reverberations beyond the fields of fire.
A Pulitzer Prize–winning historian observes that had Franklin Roosevelt served another few terms, Americans might never have had fought and died in Vietnam.
Having fought in Algeria in the French Army, Morgan (My Battle of Algiers, 2006, etc.) understands military culture and lost causes. The great lost cause in question is French control of Indochina after World War II, a conflict that witnessed a curious accommodation. Under Japanese command, French soldiers and colonialists continued to administer the territory throughout much of the war, even as Communist fighters under Ho Chi Minh and other leaders waged a steady campaign of national liberation. Ho saw no problem in the French defeat by Japan, reckoning that it exposed the faraway European power as a paper tiger. Moreover, he served as a good ally of the Allies throughout the years of the war, in at least one instance rescuing a downed American flyer but being rebuffed by American officials for his troubles. Meanwhile, writes Morgan, “FDR felt strongly that colonialism had no place in the postwar world,” grimly noting that Americans were dying in the Pacific Theatre precisely because of what he called “the short-sighted greed of the French and the British and the Dutch.” The French refusal to give up Indochina led to a grinding war of suppression that a post-FDR America supported to the tune of millions of dollars, a war against China and the Soviet Union by proxy. It also led to the legendary defeat at Dien Bien Phu, when waves of Vietminh fighters surrounded a French army—“not a single Viet ran, they all had to be killed,” said one exhausted French soldier—and, over the course of weeks, bled it dry. The author writes of the battle in specific detail rivaling the best of Bernard Fall, Neil Sheehan and other writers on the French and American wars in Indochina, linking it to the eventual immersion of the United States in Vietnam, extending the war another 20 years.
A superb portrait of battle and its reverberations beyond the fields of fire.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6664-3
Page Count: 752
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2009
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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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BOOK TO SCREEN
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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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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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