A stronger authorial voice would have strengthened this book considerably.
Indomitable women, trapped in war.
In this troubling history of four American women caught in the Philippines during World War II, historian Kaminski (History/Univ. of Wisconsin-Stevens Point; Citizen of Empire: Ethel Thomas Herold, an American in the Philippines, 2011, etc.) presents her subjects as daring, selfless, determined, and astonishingly brave. Each aided the guerrilla movement, sent food and supplies to prisoners of war, and risked their lives. The author focuses most intensively on two: Peggy Utinsky, a nurse who arrived in Manila in the 1920s, was widowed when her husband died of influenza, and in 1934 married an Army lieutenant. Claire Phillips came in 1938, looking for adventure and a career in show business. She soon met a handsome Filipino who worked as a ship’s steward, and after a brief courtship, they married. When that marriage unraveled, Claire sailed to America, only to return in 1941, when she met Pvt. John Phillips, whom she thereafter claimed was her husband. Drawing on Claire’s and Peggy’s memoirs, Claire’s FBI files, and published and unpublished memoirs of POWs and military personnel, Kaminski paints a vivid picture of the horrors of the Japanese occupation: the Bataan Death March, epidemics of malaria and dysentery, widespread beriberi and pellagra. She details Claire’s part in an underground movement, based in a nightclub she opened; Peggy established an organization called Miss U that provided prisoner relief. Both women were eventually arrested, and the author relates the torture, beatings, and starvation they suffered. But did they? Co-workers disputed their accounts: Peggy was not tortured for a month, emerging half-dead, but was questioned for only a few days and bore no bruises; Claire exaggerated her wartime work to outlandish proportions. Kaminski blames PTSD for Claire’s deception and possible alcoholism for Peggy’s, but some readers may wonder what in the narrative is verifiable history. Furthermore, the author frequently changes tenses, even midsentence, which makes for jarring reading.
A stronger authorial voice would have strengthened this book considerably.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-19-992824-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
