A military memoir refreshingly devoid of the usual patriotic overlay.
Another testosterone-laced memoir of an elite unit kicking butt in Iraq, this one with a cheerful, politically incorrect British twist.
Having missed out on Operation Iraqi Freedom a year earlier, the author’s 15-man sniper platoon in the Princess of Wales Royal Regiment was thrilled to learn in April 2004 that it was finally shipping overseas on a “peacekeeping” mission. Soldiers whose enlistment was expiring eagerly signed up again. Arriving in Iraq, Mills and his men cringed at the heat, loathed the poor sanitation, pitied the poverty, despised Iraqi police, Iraqi soldiers and all civilian superiors, but loved the American forces’ vast arsenal and luxurious amenities. Their assignment took them to a large city—lacking, the author repeats, sewage and trash collection—where they quickly walked into an ambush and found themselves enmeshed in a vicious insurgency. Mostly, they defended their base in the city center and fought as infantry, but circumstances often required their specialty, so readers looking for technical details about sniping will not be disappointed. Mills, an 18-year veteran of tours in Northern Ireland, Kosovo and Bosnia, never conceals his and his men’s love of fighting. While American career soldiers have been known to admit this in their memoirs, they usually feel obliged to justify it by proclaiming their love of country and reminding readers of the sacrifices our troops make to protect us from hordes of suicidal maniacs. Mills has no interest in defending America’s invasion of Iraq, and he adopts the traditional British soldier’s view of the enemy as wacky foreigners, genuinely dangerous but terrible shots.
A military memoir refreshingly devoid of the usual patriotic overlay.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-53126-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2008
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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