Best for armchair military history buffs. Still, if there’s another sniper scare, expect Dougan to reinvent himself as...
Subtitle tells all: a brisk, unexceptional history of snipers.
The first recorded British death by sniper was Robert Greville, Lord Brooke, felled during the English Civil War. The sniper took aim from the Lichfield Cathedral, and Brooke never had a chance. Scottish journalist Dougan (Dynamo, 2002, etc.) shows the vital role sharpshooting has played in almost all the major wars of the 20th century, and he suggests that sniper skills have turned a few ordinary men—like Gunnery Sergeant Carlos Hathcock, who killed at least 93 men in his tour of duty in Vietnam—into legends. Dougan’s treatment of nonmilitary snipers is a bit less satisfying: his rehearsal of the assassination of JFK is just that, a rehearsal of familiar details. And John Muhammad and Lee Malvo’s sniper escapades, Dougan rather banally says, remind “us of our abject fear of the nameless terror that strikes when we are most vulnerable and then vanishes.” Dougan does offer a lot of sharpshooting trivia, which readers may want to store up for cocktail parties (by all lights, George Washington should have been shot by British sharpshooter Patrick Ferguson on the banks of Brandywine Creek, except that Ferguson couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger), and he also examines the sniper as a symbol (in the 1940s, he suggests, snipers played a critical role in Soviet propaganda, heroes who would save the Soviet Union from Hitler’s aggressions). Indeed, some passages here border on propaganda: starry-eyed tales of the stealth and bravery of men like Hathcock—not to mention Dougan’s description of sharpshooting as a “craft”—run the risk of glamorizing what is, ultimately, cold, clinical killing.
Best for armchair military history buffs. Still, if there’s another sniper scare, expect Dougan to reinvent himself as talking-head pundit.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7867-1523-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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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