A welcome addition to the literature on the Vietnam War.
A detailed account of the last desperate days of the American presence in Vietnam.
Clarke (JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President, 2013, etc.) begins his harrowing narrative with Dutch photojournalist Hugh van Es’ famous photograph of people lined up on a stairway to the roof of 22 Gia Long St. in Saigon, being helped into a helicopter by a man in a white shirt and dark pants. While this shot has become “the last great photograph” of an ignoble war Americans “have spent decades trying to forget,” the author sees the gesture of the U.S. Embassy’s deputy air operations officer, O.B. Harnage, as he reaches out to help evacuating Vietnamese, as noble, even heroic. Indeed, many of the U.S. personnel at the bitter end of American occupation went to great personal and professional lengths, often illegally, to help the approximately 130,000 Vietnamese who made it out. On one hand, these Americans knew that anyone connected to the U.S. or to the administration of President Nguyen Van Thieu, which was bolstered by the U.S., would suffer serious reprisals when the Communists arrived. On the other hand, some officials, including Ambassador Graham Martin, believed that “any indication that the United States was preparing an evacuation would demoralize South Vietnam’s military.” Clarke methodically traces the “omens” that showed the writing on the wall of South Vietnam’s capitulation—e.g., the fall of Phuoc Binh, north of Saigon, in January 1975 or the American decision to halt the allocation of any more financial aid or military support. The Paris Peace Accords of January 1973, which had led to a cease-fire, had been unceremoniously violated by both sides, and America had had enough. In the end, despite persistent finger pointing, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger became insistent that the U.S. had a moral obligation to evacuate South Vietnamese allies. Moving to a hair-raising climax, Clarke meticulously sifts through hasty evacuation measures and relates the sad stories of those who did not make it out.
A welcome addition to the literature on the Vietnam War.Pub Date: April 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53964-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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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