Disappointing.
Lackluster account of the vicious murder of a soldier that became the basis for the 2007 film In the Valley of Elah.
In July 2003, shortly after returning to Fort Benning, in Columbus, Ga., from a tour in Iraq, 25-year-old Army Specialist Richard Davis went missing. Several months later his body was found buried in the woods not far from the base. Four of his fellow soldiers in Baker Company were arrested and convicted for the murder. Davis, the group’s whipping boy, was stabbed more than 100 times and his body set afire after a drunken argument outside a strip club. McCain lays out the intricacies of the crime and subsequent trial and traces the factors that led to the murder. Davis’s platoon was stressed out and on rations after engaging in exhausting firefights during the invasion of Iraq; had a cigar-chomping platoon commander who ordered troops to “shoot anything that moves”; and included a gangbanger and a violence-prone depressed soldier, both of whom were involved in the event. The author writes out of sympathy for the murdered soldier’s father, Lanny, a former military policeman, whose excruciating quest to learn why his son was murdered is made palpable; and out of outrage over such military practices as allowing gang members into the Army, giving a troubled soldier medication with severe side effects and awarding no-bid contracts to civilian firms that fail to provide adequate supplies. McCain raises serious questions about Army stonewalling in the case, and more broadly about the effects of the Iraq War on the behavior of returning veterans, but she fails to orchestrate her nuanced material into a compelling, balanced narrative. The author makes sweeping statements (“Criminal gangs are known to exist on every U.S. military base both nationally and internationally”) that cry out for substantiation. She concludes with a plea for scrutiny of how the military investigates noncombatant deaths, which are often deemed suicides but may actually be homicides.
Disappointing.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-55652-947-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2009
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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