Hansen (who until his recent death taught English at the Univ. of the Pacific) compellingly tells the story of thousands of eager young Americans who volunteered to drive ambulances for the Allies in the Great War before the US army arrived in 1917. Hansen relates little-known stories of wealthy Americans sympathetic to the Allies, like H. Herman Harjes (a banker for J.P. Morgan), Boston Brahmin Richard Norton, and A. Piatt Andrew, a former Harvard professor and assistant secretary of the treasury, who led the way in forming private ambulance companies that raised money, recruited volunteers, and purchased or received donations of automobiles to convert into ambulances. As the author relates, they dealt with stubborn French military and government bureaucrats, frustrating delays, and personality conflicts while organizing medical services for the wounded in rear combat areas. But the volunteers, mostly from Ivy League colleges and eastern prep schools (as well as the likes of Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos), proved themselves and their state-of-the-art vehicles to be more effective than French horse-drawn ambulances, and they saved countless lives. Hansen has included many personal accounts of devotion to humanitarian efforts and many encounters with horror and heroism by the gallant gentlemen who faced the enemy shells and bullets on the Western Front. In time, Hansen tells us, the volunteers' ranks were augmented by a diverse group that included cowboys, big-game hunters, a Portuguese revolutionist, a racing car driver, and several football players. Women also played a significant role as doctors and nurses. Over 3,500 Americans had served as drivers when the US army took control of ambulance details on the Western Front in October 1917. A fitting tribute, told in effective matter-of-fact style, to mostly obscure volunteers who showed great bravery in a time of cataclysmic change and great tragedy.
Pub Date: May 1, 1996
ISBN: 1-55970-313-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1996
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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