by Craig B. Smith ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 8, 2012
Readers can take comfort knowing that all six subjects survived, perhaps the only good news in these gripping though mostly...
A retired engineer who has taken up writing delivers fascinating accounts of six Japanese and Americans who passed the war in enemy hands.
Smith (Lightning: Fire From the Sky, 2008, etc.) delivers first-person stories of a GI who endured more than three terrible years as a POW in Japan and a Japanese soldier who spent a more comfortable time in the United States but felt guilty about surrendering. Casting his net widely, the author describes an Russian mining engineer and his wife, hiding and starving in the occupied Philippines, a Japanese soldier who escaped to the jungle after the U.S. reconquered Guam in 1944, emerging only in 1960, and a young Nisei woman, born and raised in Los Angeles, caught up in the shameful American internment of Japanese Americans after 1941. Smith pulls no punches portraying the cruelty of the Japanese to those under their power, but, like many amateur historians and not a few professionals, he justifies this as a consequence of the samurai Bushido tradition, which teaches that warriors fight to the death and that those who surrender are beneath contempt. In fact, traditional Bushido does not excuse brutality or require warriors to die except to preserve honor. The Japanese did not abuse prisoners from the Russo-Japanese war and World War I. Their suicidal behavior and inhumanity during World War II sprang from a new policy by 1920s military leaders who believed it would toughen Japanese soldiers, enabling them to overcome less-determined but technically advanced Western armies.
Readers can take comfort knowing that all six subjects survived, perhaps the only good news in these gripping though mostly painful stories about one of the many grim aspects of WWII.Pub Date: May 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-58834-355-0
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Smithsonian Books
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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