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FROM PEARL HARBOR TO V-J DAY

THE AMERICAN ARMED FORCES IN WORLD WAR II

A succinct account of America's wide-ranging involvement in WW II from a distinguished duo. Eschewing a chronological format, James (Military History/Virginia Military Institute) and his longtime collaborator Wells (Refighting the Last War, 1992, etc.) provide discrete perspectives on how and where the US was engaged. To begin with, they assess the prePearl Harbor preparedness of America's armed forces and the industrial complex that soon became (in FDR's felicitous phrase) ``the arsenal of democracy.'' Covered as well are such other aspects of home-front activities as the effective conscription of scientists who worked on weapons-related projects, domestic race relations, the remote camps established for Axis POWs, rationing, and the Servicemen's Readjustment Act (a.k.a. the GI Bill of Rights). The authors go on to deliver concise briefings on the major campaigns in which US airmen, marines, sailors, and soldiers participated. Starting with the Battle of the Atlantic, they review all of the important Allied offensives in the European and Mediterranean theaters, which by the spring of 1945 resulted in Nazi Germany's capitulation. James and Wells then examine how American naval and ground forces turned a series of initial defeats into a decisive triumph over the Japanese across the vast reaches of the Pacific. At the close, they offer a moving tribute to the enlisted men who did most of the fighting and dying on foreign fields. In a final reckoning of costs and casualties, moreover, the authors insist that WW II was not, as popularly supposed, a good or glorious war but the most brutal and murderous conflict in the blood-soaked annals of a weary world. As inclusive and compact a rundown as general readers are likely to get any time soon. The consistently absorbing text has 11 useful maps, an index, and a savvy discussion of sources.

Pub Date: March 3, 1995

ISBN: 1-56663-072-X

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995

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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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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

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