Occasionally repetitious, but a stirring account of bravery and fortitude. (maps and 8 pp. b&w photos)
Exhaustive account of an early WWII battle and its aftermath, adroitly combining the testimony of 68 men who defended Wake Island and were held as POWs for almost four years.
Two years after the death of his brother Kenneth, paperback novelist Cunningham “realized that I knew very little about what happened to him during sixteen horrendous days in December 1941.” The author talked with as many veterans as he could find to learn about the campaign against Wake, a tiny atoll 2,300 miles west of Hawaii. The initial attack, only five hours after Pearl Harbor, destroyed most of the US fighter planes. On December 11, the Japanese attempted a landing along the south shore, but were repulsed. It seemed a renewed assault might be forestalled by the arrival of American reinforcements from Hawaii, but those forces hesitated and retreated. On December 23, a large Japanese invasion overran the defenders, who surrendered. Cunningham produces little material about the period between the landing and the US surrender; overall, although he does supplement the first-person accounts with a historical overview, his description of the battle could have been better. He couldn’t really go wrong, however, with the soldier’s subsequent ordeal, horrifying and gripping in equal portions. Five American prisoners were beheaded on the trip to Yokohama and Shanghai, and 98 civilian workers held on Wake were later slaughtered. Overworked and undernourished, the prisoners built a rifle range in China, labored in a mine in northern Japan, and did industrial work near Tokyo. One marine’s weight went from 180 to 87 pounds. One third of POWs in China and Japan died. Other men were killed after August 15, 1945, when B29 bombers recklessly dropped relief supplies in large containers. Cunningham’s assiduous search for survivors, unfortunately, did not lead to any veterans who remembered his brother.
Occasionally repetitious, but a stirring account of bravery and fortitude. (maps and 8 pp. b&w photos)Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-7867-1096-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
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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