A poignant memoir and consciousness-raiser, but not the clarion call that our veterans require.
Prolific ghostwriter Whitney takes her veteran brother’s untimely death—alone at age 53 with just $62 in his bank account—as a starting point for this meditation on what it means to be a veteran in America.
The nation’s ambivalence toward its veterans, the author suggests, is reflected in the contrast between words and deeds, between the ubiquity of yellow “support our troops” magnets on one hand and the number of veterans without adequate institutional support on the other. Whitney feels ambivalent about her estrangement from her brother, who served three tours in Vietnam as a combat engineer while she attended antiwar rallies stateside. “His resentment survived the decades,” she writes. “I was his Jane Fonda, the one who could never be forgiven.” Their personal conflict turned ugly nearly a decade after the war ended, and Jim disappeared to suffer his demons in solitude. Whitney persuasively argues that her brother’s fate is common among veterans of all ages. All but forgotten today, World War I veterans who had gathered in a tent city to shame the Hoover administration into raising their benefits were fired upon by troops ordered to the scene by Douglas MacArthur, who had convinced the president that the agitators were communists. Even the Greatest Generation vets, held up as models for the supposedly selfish Boomers of the Vietnam era, are not immune to the psychologically devastating effects of war. Whitney recounts numerous stories of retirees revisiting the horrors of long-ago battles with delayed posttraumatic stress disorder. More recently, veterans have had to fight an entrenched bureaucracy and partisan politicians to have their service-connected disabilities even recognized, let alone attended to. Though Whitney’s goal—to redress a wrong she feels she participated in against her brother and other veterans—is admirable, she ultimately becomes just another voice of complaint against a notoriously unjust system. She scolds but doesn’t offer a vision of how the system must change.
A poignant memoir and consciousness-raiser, but not the clarion call that our veterans require.Pub Date: May 15, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-306-81788-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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