A lively depiction of America's development of superior air power.
As a former naval officer who served during Vietnam, Sears (Such Men As These: The Story of the Navy Pilots Who Flew the Deadly Skies Over Korea, 2010, etc.) brings an insider's knowledge of combat to this comprehensive history of the air war in the Pacific during World War II.
The author begins with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, so unexpected that tragically the only group of American fighters to take to the air was shot down by friendly fire. Sears juxtaposes that chaotic scene with festivities at a new Grumman Aircraft Engineering facility scheduled to open the next day. America had begun to prepare for war with an impressive buildup during the previous year. By the end of the war, Grumman had put about 30,000 planes in the air, including 12,000 advanced F6F Hellcats, which gave U.S. forces a significant advantage in the Pacific—even though at the start of the war, the Japanese Zero was a faster fighter plane with a better climb rate and turning radius. Sears also tells the less well-known, fascinating story of the fearless test pilots who risked their lives. They were employed by Grumman beginning in the 1930s—before the 1941 boom—in the aircraft industry, and many were killed testing the capabilities of dive bombers as well as the new generation of fighter planes. The author shows how American fighter pilots compensated for the early superiority of the Zero by developing new tactical formations that allowed them to outfly the enemy, and he goes behind the scenes to describe the high morale of American airmen.
A lively depiction of America's development of superior air power.Pub Date: June 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-306-81948-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2011
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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