Readers certainly won’t be bored, but they’ll find a richer, more comprehensive account in George Feifer’s Tennozan: The...
A history of the battle of Okinawa, from investigative reporter Sloan (Brotherhood of Heroes: The Marines at Peleliu, 1944—The Bloodiest Battle of the Pacific War, 2005, etc.).
Okinawa’s Japanese commander decided not to defend the beaches for the logical reason that earlier attempts on other islands had failed in the face of overwhelming naval firepower. His 110,000 troops retreated to the island’s mountainous southern third, where they constructed dense interlocking fortifications including elaborate underground tunnels and living quarters. American forces also learned from earlier battles. Previous bombardments had left defenses largely intact, so Okinawa received the greatest pounding in history, which devastated civilians and literally demolished Okinawan culture but hardly touched Japanese defenses. Landing April 1, the Americans were amazed at the absence of resistance. A week passed before they encountered the enemy and launched nearly three months of brutal fighting during which 107,000 Japanese and 12,000 Americans died—the United States’s greatest loss in any battle during World War II. Since the Japanese were defending a remote section of the island, far from the critical airfields, readers may wonder why U.S. leaders didn’t simply seal off the area and allow the already starving defenders to wither. The author reminds us more than once that Okinawa’s stout defense convinced U.S. leaders that invading Japan proper, scheduled for November, would cost massive casualties. Sharing this belief, soldiers breathed a sigh of relief upon hearing of the atom bomb. Writing from the American point of view, Sloan pays less attention to Japanese military actions and to Okinawans, who died in greater numbers than both combatants. Like many popular historians, the author can’t resist enlivening a story that needs little dramatization—though some of the veterans’ stories are compelling.
Readers certainly won’t be bored, but they’ll find a richer, more comprehensive account in George Feifer’s Tennozan: The Battle of Okinawa and the Dropping of the Atomic Bomb (1992).Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9246-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2007
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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