The authors do a commendable job of showing just how righteous Carter’s cause was, bringing deserved honor to their subject.
A well-grounded exposé of the official racism that for more than half a century denied due honor to a combat hero, as told by his daughter-in-law and historian Allen (The Port Chicago Mutiny, 1989).
Until the final months of WWII, African-American soldiers served in segregated units and, with a few exceptions such as the Tuskegee Airmen, were kept unarmed and away from the fighting. When, after the Battle of the Bulge, the army finally allowed black soldiers to volunteer for front-line duty, a young, mixed-race noncommissioned officer named Eddie Carter transferred into George Patton’s command and, in one of the first battles to take place on German soil, exhibited great heroism under fire, saving the lives of his men while silencing a Wehrmacht line and suffering substantial injuries. Carter received a Distinguished Service Medal and by any consideration deserved the Medal of Honor. But none of the 294 medals of that exalted class awarded in WWII went to any of the 1.2 million African-Americans who served. In 1992, following pressure by veterans’ groups, the Army investigated this inequity, and seven years later, Bill Clinton awarded a posthumous Medal of Honor to Carter, who died in 1963. The authors attribute the Army’s failure to recognize Carter earlier to several causes, not least of them the undisguised racism of General Mark Clark, who considered Carter politically suspect because he had served as a volunteer in antifascist forces during the Spanish Civil War and had openly complained about the treatment of black servicemen after the war, commenting, “We liberated Europe, but here at home we are not free.” Clark’s opposition not only kept Carter from earning due recognition, but also prevented him from reenlisting in the Army despite his evident skill as a soldier.
The authors do a commendable job of showing just how righteous Carter’s cause was, bringing deserved honor to their subject.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-621236-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2002
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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