A well-told narrative of US participation in the most godawful and useless of modern wars. In 1917, on the eve of its entry into WWI, the US was without a single army division. Nineteen months later, the nation’s armed and naval forces had grown to 4 million people, and their deployment had tipped the balance of war in Europe against the Central Powers. Farwell, a vivid chronicler of military forces, generals, and wars (Armies of the Raj: From Mutiny to Independence, 1989, etc.), here describes that extraordinary build-up of American armed might and what it wrought. It’s hard to imagine a better, and better-written, tale of the US’s first military venture on European soil. What the book lacks in fresh insights or perspective it makes up for in compactness, comprehensiveness, balance, and style. Perhaps never before have so many topics about this Great War been covered with such economy and to such effect. We learn of storied generals and unknown doughboys, preparedness and weaponry, trench warfare and African-Americans in battle, and campaigns and peace maneuvers—as well as the horrors of the battlefront. And we learn of them always with an apt story, a telling statistic, or a sharp portrait’such as of the fabled Sergeant Alvin York or the “Lost Battalion.” It’s regrettable, however, that little of the stupidity and absurdity of war (so brilliantly brought to life in the works of Paul Fussell) finds its place in Farwell’s account.Nevertheless, someone looking for an introduction to this part of American history will find the basics of what should be known in this book. A fine place to go for a narrative history of its subject. (photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-393-04698-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 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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