An occasionally winning look at one of the most famous Marine fighter squadrons of WWII and the subject of the classic TV series Baa Baa Black Sheep. Covering Marine Fighting Squadron 214’s actions and movements throughout the Pacific theater in WWII, Gamble, a retired naval officer, jumps chaotically between mind-numbing minutiae and hilarious anecdotes. He covers such important topics as the quest for reliable aircraft and parts, the search for and downing of Admiral Yamamoto’s aircraft (he was the mastermind of the attack on Pearl Harbor), and, less crucially, methods for keeping a beer chilled in WWII-era aircraft. Beginning with the formation of the squadron in the early days of the war, the author covers the training and recruitment of the force and continues even after the group is dispersed and various members captured or killed. The key members of the squadron, including the now-famous “Pappy— Boyington, are well enough described but don’t come across as multifaceted characters. Gamble has a good ability for describing the aerial actions of the squadron, so it’s unfortunate that his writing has a tendency toward the melodramatic; and with chapter titles such as “First Blood” and “The Bullets Fly” and “Black Sheep Scattered,” it will be no surprise that the prose is rather clichÇ-ridden and predictable. However, there can be no faulting his use of sources, and the book includes appendixes reprinting all manner of documents and materials. Gamble has written a good, well-researched history of an important group in American military history, but one that is too drably written to appeal to any but the specialist. (43 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-89141-644-7
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Presidio/Random
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1998
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 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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