An intense focus on the human side of war but marred by weak writing and unoriginal characters.
Pula’s (With Courage and Honor, 2010, etc.) first foray into fiction chronicles the lives of a group of World War II bombers in the Air Force.
The first volume in a series, the novel explores the early military careers of two aspiring pilots. The story opens as quiet but brilliant 2nd Lt. Matthew Moore, part Native American, is accosted by a group of white officers who have learned that he is engaged to a white woman. Though gigantic in stature, gentle Matt is severely wounded by a knife in the struggle; he’s saved from death by fellow pilot-in-training 1st Lt. Jack Harrington, who runs off the racist mob and ensures Matt receives proper treatment at the base hospital. The two become fast friends and help each other train to fly the B-17 Flying Fortress bomber. After only a short time, Jack is honored to become Matt’s best man, while Matt helps Jack overcome his grief after receiving a Dear John letter from his sweetheart back home. Though filled with technical details regarding the Air Force during World War II, the novel is more focused on the men preparing for battle. The author delves into the characters backstories with varying degrees of success: Results are often interesting, although certain players are reduced to stock characters. The author skillfully folds historical details into the narrative. Especially effective is a scene involving a survivor from the fall of Warsaw and the Nazi death camps. Unfortunately, the protagonists come across too sickly sweet or squeaky clean—in fact, nearly all the characters are extremely attractive, without vices and with pure motivations. Furthermore, clichéd romantic scenes involving Matt and his wife, Evelyn, feel out of place with the rest of the text. The prose can be clunky and repetitive; when introduced, each character is described by hair color, height and weight. What does shine, though, is the author’s love for her subjects. Pula makes an admirable attempt at examining how men so young dealt with the responsibility of liberating Europe and destroying Nazi Germany, despite coming from a country that was often inhospitable.
An intense focus on the human side of war but marred by weak writing and unoriginal characters.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2011
ISBN: 978-1935122296
Page Count: 348
Publisher: Whitehall Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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