An absorbing biography of Vietnam's ranking soldier-statesman and, arguably, one of military history's greatest captains, from a scholar who gained direct access to him. Drawing on interviews with and material supplied by Giap (who turned 85 earlier this year), Currey (Edward Lansdale, 1988) offers an engrossing account of how his protagonist played a leading role in an impoverished, industrially backward nation's military defeat of two Western powers. A dedicated member of the Communist Party long before he became a warrior, the self-taught Giap accomplished much as supreme commander of his country's guerrilla, militia, and regular-army forces. Having conducted effective anti-colonial insurgencies during the late 1940s, for example, he routed the French in a pitched battle at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Giap subsequently organized grassroots resistance in South Vietnam and masterminded campaigns that made continuation of America's Indochinese commitments politically untenable after the Tet offensive of 1968. In his tellingly detailed narrative (which doubles as a chronicle of armed conflict in Vietnam from the preWW II era through the border clashes with Cambodia and China in 1979), Currey (History/Univ. of South Florida) does not shy from cataloguing Giap's shortcomings. Among other things, he faults him for his active involvement in the Politburo's bloody pogroms and his willingness to sustain appalling casualties in pursuit of his objectives. The author nonetheless gives Giap full marks for strategic vision, geopolitical savvy, tactical finesse, and grasp of logistics. Currey also makes a fine job of reconstructing Giap's early years as a teacher and the influences that set him on a revolutionary's path. An authoritative briefing on a great general. (8 pages photos, maps, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1996
ISBN: 1-57488-056-X
Page Count: 432
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1996
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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