Of considerable interest to students of the Pacific War.
A victor’s-eye view of the desperate suicide-bombing campaign in the closing months of World War II.
Former naval officer Sears (The Last Epic Naval Battle: Voices from Leyte Gulf, 2005) writes affectingly of the terror the “divine wind” campaign wrought on American sailors. Contrasting the fate of several American ships to that of USS Cole in the 2000 al-Qaeda terror attack, he demonstrates the damage that the Imperial Navy suicide bombers wrought. That campaign, he observes, was a mark of having no other options, the American fleet having destroyed most of Japan’s and forcing “a stunning new ‘backs-against-the-wall’ paradigm for modern warfare.” The author focuses on U.S. forces, though with considerable attention to the Japanese side of the equation, for which readers will also want to consult Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney’s provocative Kamikaze Diaries (2006) and Albert Axell’s Kamikaze: Japan’s Suicide Gods (2002). Sears does a particularly good job of bringing in the various voices of the fast-dwindling corps of American survivors of hellish engagements at Leyte and Okinawa, among other places. Drawing on interviews, diaries and other sources, the author depicts men such as a Marine junior officer who, his soldiers suspected, slept at attention, in contrast with one of those fighters who weighed only 135 pounds and was “quiet, introspective, and mild mannered.” Both served valiantly, as did most of their comrades, even though, by the closing months of the war, recruits were pushed through training and sent into the field as “90-day wonders fresh from Midshipman School.” The horror of kamikaze steeled them—those who survived, that is, for the attacks took a terrible toll on American sailors, Marines and soldiers, which left “even the healthiest…veterans perplexed and embittered at a nation, culture, and people capable of devising such attacks.” Sears closes with a look at how veterans on both sides bridged the gulf between them.
Of considerable interest to students of the Pacific War.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8065-2893-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Citadel/Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 Yorkerstaff 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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