Overly sentimental writing may test some readers, but the authors deliver a great war story.
A breathless history of World War II heroism.
After conquering Guadalcanal in early 1943, American military leaders planned to invade Bougainville, several hundred miles north. Little was known about its defenses, however, so the air force required a reconnaissance mission. One crew volunteered, flying an unescorted 600-mile mission from the New Guinea base in “Old 666,” a shabby B-17 bomber that returned, crippled, with precious film but also dead and wounded soldiers. Journalists and longtime co-authors Drury and Clavin (The Heart of Everything that Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, an American Legend, 2013, etc.) tell a fascinating story somewhat diminished by fictionalized prose full of invented dialogue and insight into the characters’ thoughts. The mission doesn’t begin until more than 200 pages into the narrative, but most readers will not complain, as they encounter a biography of an interesting lead character: talented pilot Jay Zeamer, a brilliant nonconformist who yearned to fly the new, high-tech B-17 but whose superiors didn’t trust him. Bored by the minimal duties of a co-pilot, he often slept during missions. Frustrated with the lack of action, he and a like-minded coterie found a junkyard B-17 and spent their spare time returning it to flying condition, adding multiple machine guns to its complement. It flew several missions before photographing Bougainville while Japanese fighters attacked it for over an hour. “The final flight of Old 666 with Capt. Jay Zeamer at the helm…remains the longest continuous dogfight in the annals of the United States Air Force,” write the authors. Though crewmates thought Zeamer was dead after they landed, he and another crew member received the Medal of Honor and the remainder, the Distinguished Service Cross, making them the war’s most decorated aircrew.
Overly sentimental writing may test some readers, but the authors deliver a great war story.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-7485-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.
Jackie Kennedy's secret service agent Hill and co-author McCubbin team up for a follow-up to Mrs. Kennedy and Me (2012) in this well-illustrated narrative of those five days 50 years ago when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
Since Hill was part of the secret service detail assigned to protect the president and his wife, his firsthand account of those days is unique. The chronological approach, beginning before the presidential party even left the nation's capital on Nov. 21, shows Kennedy promoting his “New Frontier” policy and how he was received by Texans in San Antonio, Houston and Fort Worth before his arrival in Dallas. A crowd of more than 8,000 greeted him in Houston, and thousands more waited until 11 p.m. to greet the president at his stop in Fort Worth. Photographs highlight the enthusiasm of those who came to the airports and the routes the motorcades followed on that first day. At the Houston Coliseum, Kennedy addressed the leaders who were building NASA for the planned moon landing he had initiated. Hostile ads and flyers circulated in Dallas, but the president and his wife stopped their motorcade to respond to schoolchildren who held up a banner asking the president to stop and shake their hands. Hill recounts how, after Lee Harvey Oswald fired his fatal shots, he jumped onto the back of the presidential limousine. He was present at Parkland Hospital, where the president was declared dead, and on the plane when Lyndon Johnson was sworn in. Hill also reports the funeral procession and the ceremony in Arlington National Cemetery. “[Kennedy] would have not wanted his legacy, fifty years later, to be a debate about the details of his death,” writes the author. “Rather, he would want people to focus on the values and ideals in which he so passionately believed.”
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3149-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.
A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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