An important story enriched by solid research and authorial commitment but weakened by excess.
A thoroughly researched but somewhat cluttered account of Ted Williams and other professional baseball players who enlisted in the military in World War II and also managed to play some baseball.
In her debut, Keene, a trained journalist and former Capitol Hill speechwriter, recounts how she stumbled across this story in 2013 when, going through some things that had belonged to her late father, a former minor leaguer and lifelong baseball fan, she found materials relating to the Cloudbuster Nine. Her father had been the batboy for this Navy team undergoing their preflight training in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a team that featured, among others, Red Sox standouts Ted Williams and Johnny Pesky. But the author has more than one story to tell (despite the focus suggested by her subtitle). She narrates the sad arc of her father’s baseball biography, the development of the preflight training regimen, the lives of many others involved in the program, her own immersion in the sport (which came much later in her life), her research, and her interviews of some elderly sources and some descendants of her principals. Her research is exhaustive and impressive, but the work suffers from all her work, as well. It appears that Keene struggled with what she needed to include or exclude. As a result, the narrative continually takes offramps to stories and facts the author unearthed, information which, though sometimes interesting, often serves as a distraction. Keene also often employs conventional and even clichéd expressions—e.g., “an unshakable bond,” “fit him like a glove.” Still, the story she has found is historically significant, and she does not neglect the fact that many professional athletes enlisted in the military and that very few do so today.
An important story enriched by solid research and authorial commitment but weakened by excess.Pub Date: June 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68358-207-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Sports Publishing/Skyhorse
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
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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