Poignant, bittersweet lives of unsung and overlooked American heroes.
Stories of men and families who made the ultimate sacrifice for an often hostile homeland.
Tuskegee Army Flying School in Alabama, established in January 1941 to train Black pilots for the military nearly a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor, was considered an experiment that some in the starkly segregated military never expected or hoped would succeed. Racists at the Department of War were skeptical that Black people even had the right stuff to fly an airplane. When First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt on a whim in an April 1941 visit to the school hopped into a two-seater for an hour-long flight over Tuskegee with a Black flight instructor, her security detail had a fit. (Upon landing, Roosevelt turned to her pilot and said, “Well, you can fly all right.”) Hundreds of ambitious young Black men signed up for the program. The best flew missions accompanying Allied bombers in Europe, often out of Ramitelli, Italy. Twenty-seven of these men never returned home, lost under mysterious circumstances. Thompson, a veteran investigative journalist for the Washington Post and NPR whose father was Tuskegee trained, suggests that many of these incidents were due to faulty single-engine fighter planes that were already old when the Tuskegee pilots were assigned to fly them. One family member told Thompson she believed the military “intentionally equipped the young, inexperienced Black pilots, like her dad, with less than stellar aircraft because the men weren’t wanted as pilots in World War II, to begin with.” Interviews with survivors, many now in their 90s, reveal intense feelings of pride and sorrow over the lives lost, and lingering anger over the shoddy treatment their loved ones faced in the U.S. and abroad.
Poignant, bittersweet lives of unsung and overlooked American heroes.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2026
ISBN: 9781496750778
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dafina/Kensington
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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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