By Sloan’s lights, Peleliu is perhaps the biggest unknown battle of the Pacific War—unknown, perhaps, because pointless. A...
A well-rendered account of Marines in combat on what must have been some of the worst acreage on earth.
The battle to take Peleliu, a scrubby island 600 miles east of Mindanao, was something of an accident of history. The Japanese had arrived there in the 1930s to establish an outpost for what was to become their short-lived Pacific empire, and they had had plenty of time to dig in and make a fortress of the five-square-mile island. But it was the destruction of the huge Japanese base at Truk, 500 miles east, that made Peleliu essential to the Japanese; writes Sloan (Given Up for Dead, 2003, etc.), it forced the Japanese combined fleet command to establish a new headquarters in the Palau archipelago, putting Peleliu in the line of fire. There were worse places: the Marines slated to attack Peleliu had previously done duty at a nasty little island called Pavavu, overrun by rats and land crabs, and many of them went mad or committed suicide before seeing the next big battle. (To his credit, Bob Hope put Pavavu on his USO circuit, a big morale booster for the men there.) That next big battle was, Sloan argues, unnecessary. Peleliu’s offensive capacity had been obliterated by U.S. bombing raids, and it posed no threat to Douglas MacArthur’s return to the Philippines. Even the Japanese command declared Peleliu’s garrison “expendable,” and the ranking officer there knew “that his troops’ only remaining mission was to mount as tenacious a defense as possible if and when the American landing came.” It did, and they did; it took a full month of close combat to rout the Japanese, at a cost of 6,500 Marines—and, as Sloan notes, at the staggering cost of more than 1,500 rounds of ammunition to kill each of the 10,000 Japanese who died at Peleliu.
By Sloan’s lights, Peleliu is perhaps the biggest unknown battle of the Pacific War—unknown, perhaps, because pointless. A lively reconstruction that does honor to the men who fought it.Pub Date: May 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-6009-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 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 Yorkerstaff 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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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