by Arthur L. Boyd ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 13, 2007
Readers who suspend disbelief will encounter an absorbing, technically accurate story of military derring-do from a...
Controversial, entertaining and sometimes plausible account of a long-secret, behind-the-lines 1952 mission into North Korea.
The North’s 1950 invasion of South Korea caught the United States by surprise. Six months later, massive Chinese forces descended on advancing UN troops, again catching America unaware. A furious President Truman realized that neither the newly formed CIA nor the extensive military intelligence services had reliable sources of information in the Far East, let alone in Korea itself. As a temporary fix, he approved a bizarre covert operation whose members were sworn to secrecy until 1998. Nine volunteers landed by submarine inside North Korea, where they met a unit of Chinese Nationalist soldiers wearing communist uniforms. Posing as the captured crew of a B-29 bomber, the Americans and their fake captors drove across North Korea, picking up reports from local spies and radioing the findings. A helicopter was to collect the men when they reached the opposite coast, but communist forces ambushed the group, and only the author survived. Boyd, a communications specialist responsible for encoding and transmission, writes that he was staggered at the spies’ findings, which revealed new armies of well-trained and eager Chinese and North Koreans, a steady stream of supplies flowing south, extensive fortifications along the coast and behind the lines and airfields in Manchuria where Russian nuclear-armed bombers waited in case UN forces approached too near. The author maintains that this knowledge prevented World War III by convincing Truman it would be suicide to advance further. Some readers may question this assertion. Historians agree that essentially all spies sent to North Korea were either killed or captured and forced to send false information.
Readers who suspend disbelief will encounter an absorbing, technically accurate story of military derring-do from a half-forgotten war.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-78672-086-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2007
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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