Although Gordon Prange’s At Dawn We Slept (1981) is showing its age, it remains the best source on the run-up to the attack....
Bookshelves groan with accounts of the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and its aftermath, but readers will not regret this thick new contribution to the literature.
Journalist and historian Nelson (The Age of Radiance: The Epic Rise and Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Era, 2014, etc.) emphasizes that understanding Japanese politics would not have helped the United States forestall the attack because the Japanese government was out of control. “One simple explanation for Pearl Harbor…is the great difficulty American leaders had in crafting an effective defense strategy against an enemy that had lost its mind,” he writes. The main problem with the Japanese command was that no one was in charge. Civilian leaders were subservient to the military. The army and navy never cooperated, but, most disastrously, everyone was at the mercy of a wackily patriotic movement among midlevel officers who murdered any superior regarded as insufficiently devoted to their nation’s destiny. Popular opinion considered the practice technically illegal but admirable, similar to how Americans regard the Boston Tea Party. With lively prose and many astute insights, Nelson chronicles the Japanese-American political jockeying before moving on to the action, where he does not disappoint. Battle descriptions are socially acceptable historical porn, so readers’ eyes will be glued to the page as Nelson weaves archival research, interviews, and personal experiences from both sides into a blow-by-blow narrative of destruction liberally sprinkled with individual heroism, bizarre escapes, and equally bizarre tragedies. Oddly, the author reserves the extensive investigation and scapegoating for the appendix, spending perhaps too many pages on the Doolittle Raid and a workmanlike account of the Pacific War.
Although Gordon Prange’s At Dawn We Slept (1981) is showing its age, it remains the best source on the run-up to the attack. Nelson covers this admirably but comes into his own when the fireworks begin.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6049-4
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
HISTORY | MODERN | MILITARY | GENERAL HISTORY
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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