Military buffs will enjoy the nuts-and-bolts battle details, but Sears also offers a solid general history of naval air...
Quality military history of naval aviation during the Korean War.
Historians traditionally bemoan America’s enthusiastic disarmament after World War II, and former U.S. Navy officer Sears (At War with the Wind: The Epic Struggle with Japan’s World War II Suicide Bombers, 2008, etc.) does not rock the boat. Budgets shrank, both draftees and skilled career men were discharged, ships were scrapped and vital military-technology research—jets, helicopters, new carrier designs—was shelved. North Korea’s 1950 invasion of the South found the United States with only a single, old aircraft carrier in the Pacific. After a scramble to refurbish the ships, recall reservists and spend generous new appropriations, Navy leaders assembled an impressive fleet that rained destruction on the North. As with Vietnam, North Korea was a poor, agricultural country with few of the key industrial targets bombers prefer, so airmen concentrated on railroads, bridges, tunnels and road traffic, which provided only occasional dramatic destruction in exchange for a steady stream of casualties. Sears does not shy away from politics and technical developments, but he focuses on an almost day-to-day account of carrier ground-attack missions. He follows the lives of a dozen Navy airmen, painting a vivid picture of their background, flight training and problems flying obsolete propeller aircraft, rudimentary early jets and the first futuristic but alarmingly dangerous helicopters. The author includes the moving story of the first black naval aviator, as well as the horrendous experience of several pilots taken prisoner.
Military buffs will enjoy the nuts-and-bolts battle details, but Sears also offers a solid general history of naval air warfare.Pub Date: May 15, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-306-81851-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2010
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 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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