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AMERICAN SAMURAI

MYTH, IMAGINATION, AND THE CONDUCT OF BATTLE IN THE FIRST MARINE DIVISION, 1941-1951

In a revision of his 1990 doctoral dissertation, Cameron (History/Old Dominion Univ.) attempts to anatomize the esprit of the 1st Division of the US Marine Corps on the basis of its performance during WW II and after. In aid of his implicitly pejorative inquiry, the author addresses ways in which ``historically invisible'' cultural beliefs, perceptions, traditions, and other band-of-brothers bonds related to the actual conduct of battle. After sketching in the limited pre-Pearl Harbor role played by the publicity-mined USMC in the American military, Cameron critiques its training regimens, frequently comparing them to those employed by the Waffen SS or other killer elites. Getting down to cases, the author offers anecdotal accounts (drawn largely from contemporary sources) of how shared ideology, myths, and self-images affected the 1st Division's campaigns against Japanese troops in the Pacific theater (Guadalcanal, Peleliu, Okinawa) and their subsequent clashes with other Asiatic adversaries in China and Korea. Among other things, Cameron concludes that Marines not only demonized but denigrated their foes, frequently on racial grounds; and that they were encouraged further to consider themselves far superior to their counterparts in other branches of the armed services. Exactly what point the author's arguable findings have, though, is unclear. To illustrate, he implies without stating that the USMC's methods of preparing for and engaging in warfare were deplorable and need to be understood if they are to be set right (albeit in undisclosed fashion). The actual result if our armed forces were to modify the ways they ready themselves to fight remains another story—one Cameron avoids altogether. In brief, then, an academic's examination of a presumptive pathology, which will strike many readers as rotten to the Corps. (Photos, line drawings, and maps.)

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1994

ISBN: 0-521-44168-4

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Cambridge Univ.

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1993

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

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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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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