For buffs of World War II–era aviation history and the Pacific campaigns.
A history of some of the first American fliers to engage with the Japanese enemy following Pearl Harbor and Midway.
The Japanese attack on American bases in the Pacific was still fresh in memory, writes former naval aviator Gamble (Invasion Rabaul: The Epic Story of Lark Force, the Forgotten Garrison, January-July 1942, 2014, etc.), when a dozen B-17 bombers and their crews arrived in Australia. The small squadron was assigned to lay into distant Japanese targets, including a “1,600-mile raid on the Japanese stronghold at Rabaul.” Only some of the planes were able to fly, owing to accidents and mechanical problems; without adequate fighter support at first, they made easy targets for Japanese fighter planes, including newly outfitted float planes. The first bombers could carry only a few bombs each, given the weight of the fuel needed for such long hauls, but on occasion they made them count. The American air assault on New Guinea was only a minor part of the overall campaign, but it was enough to dissuade Japanese forces from attempting a threatened invasion of Australia. Gamble isn’t much of a stylist—“oblivious to the cigarettes constantly dangling from their lips, they orchestrated the myriad chores necessary to prepare a twenty-ton bomber for combat"—and the story is largely a footnote in the American air war in the Pacific, mainly carried out from aircraft carriers and island bases closer to the Philippines and then the Japanese homeland. Still, the author has a solid grasp of big-picture strategy and of the alternating tedium and terror of war, especially as bomber crews experienced it, never knowing when anti-aircraft fire would take them down or the fuel would run out before they could return to base. Gamble closes with the search for a downed bomber and its return, decades after crashing, to American soil.
For buffs of World War II–era aviation history and the Pacific campaigns.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-306-90312-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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