Another memorable slice of 20th-century history, measuring up to such earlier Halberstam classics as The Best and the...
The master journalist’s 21st and final book: a magisterial account of the Korean War.
Halberstam’s latest (The Education of a Coach, 2005, etc.) is a vivid chronicle packed with anecdotes and the stories of great men. North Korea’s Kim Il-Sung was a loyal Stalinist. America had installed Syngman Rhee in the South because he was Christian, spoke English and was the only Korean known in Washington. Halberstam describes both as thoroughly unpleasant autocrats but fierce nationalists, each equally anxious to unite Korea under his own leadership. Kim yearned to invade, but Stalin refused to provoke America until 1950, when he gave reluctant permission. Far East Commander Douglas MacArthur insisted North Korea would never attack; after being proven wrong, he remained mysteriously inactive for several days. Everyone feared Stalin was launching World War III and cheered Truman’s decision to intervene. At first, MacArthur handled the defense competently; his brilliant behind-the-lines landing at Inchon in September 1950 shattered North Korea’s army. Ignoring Washington’s suggestions to stop at the 38th parallel, MacArthur pushed north toward the Chinese border, despite good intelligence that Chinese units were pouring south. Once again, he dithered when disaster struck and did little to rally his defeated forces. A national icon but detested by his superiors, MacArthur finally overstepped by loudly advocating total war against China. Truman dismissed him, an act now considered courageous that at the time outraged the nation. MacArthur’s successor, WWII hero Matthew Ridgway, performed brilliantly in stopping the Chinese, but more than two years of bloody stalemate followed. As America’s first modern war without victory, Korea was the conflict everyone wanted to forget. It was a black hole of history, Halberstam writes, a war with China that never should have happened.
Another memorable slice of 20th-century history, measuring up to such earlier Halberstam classics as The Best and the Brightest (1972) and The Powers That Be (1979).Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4013-0052-4
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
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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