An American pilot’s remarkable diary, copied in a small notebook hidden in a footlocker for over 50 years, records his amazing escape from the notorious March of Death ordeal inflicted by Japanese soldiers on American and Filipino POW’s and his further dangerous adventures during the last days of Bataan and Corregidor in the 1942 Philippines. The diary records how Gause, an army pilot without a plane since MacArthur’s aircraft were destroyed on the ground after the Japanese sneak attack on Luzon, joined an American infantry unit to continue fighting against a swarming, ruthless enemy that pushed the gallant defenders from Manila to the dense jungles and killing fields of Bataan. Gause was one of the 78,000 American and Filipino soldiers running out of food, medicines, and ammunition who were captured by the Japanese. Nearly 60,000 died in captivity from hunger, thirst, disease, and murder. Gause escaped into the jungle after killing a Japanese sentry and swam through shark-infested waters to Corregidor amid brushes with death from enemy patrols. He found and repaired an abandoned fishing boat and undertook an unbelievable voyage to other islands and Australia after meeting another escaped American officer. Only the constant help and courage of patriotic Filipinos and other natives protected the two Americans from tropical storms, hunger, mosquitoes, and Japanese planes and ships. Gause and Osborne subsisted on raw fish, coconuts, bananas, rice, and rainwater. A Nazi agent dressed as an American colonel tried to kill them while they slept, but they were able to overpower the spy and leave him for dead. After many close calls during a harrowing 3,200 mile voyage to Australia and freedom, they were presented to General MacArthur ten months after the fall of Manila. The two were awarded Distinguished Service Crosses and then sent home for a well-deserved furlough. A suspenseful odyssey, rescued from obscurity, that honors two valiant and resourceful soldiers who never gave up hope to survive an impossible nightmare. A worthy addition to the rich lore of WWII. A movie is planned. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 10, 1999
ISBN: 0-7868-6510-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1999
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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