A rambling, jingoistic account of the various adventures of America’s ground infantry, by a US army colonel and infantry brigade commander with a doctorate in history from the University of Chicago (Savage Peace: Americans at War in the 1990s, 1995). Bolger uses the various military operations of the recent past (Panama, Somalia, the Gulf War) to look at the forms of infantry and the ways in which they have served in combat. With chapters such as “Death from Above” (on paratroopers) and “Hell on Wheels” (motorized infantry), each looking at a different form of combat, Bolger fires military jargon so rapidly that few who have not graduated West Point will understand. Worse than the jargon is the fact that not until the very end of the book does the author do much to analyze how each form of combat is relevant to the broader mission of the military. Instead, he glories in the details of various military exploits and cheerleads the American forces (“Colonel John Sylvester’s Tigers demonstrated armored warfare at the doctoral level, administering a series of hard lessons to Iraqis on the receiving end”). Bolger does little to look at the less glorious challenges facing today’s infantry: challenges like limited pay, health risks (such as Gulf War Syndrome), and cutbacks in the military. Instead, the author offers detailed descriptions of the wide array of weapons available to his “grunts.” And he occasionally, but all too rarely, offers an exciting look at battle conditions, as he does for the Gulf War. Too much jargon for the layperson, too trivial for the amateur battlefield historian. (photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-89141-671-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Presidio/Random
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1998
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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