During WW II, Vice Admiral Matome Ugaki was the only known member of the Japanese Navy's high command to keep a diary. The ever-prolific Hoyt (Hirohito, 1992, etc.) now draws on this unusually candid journal (begun in October 1941) to offer an absorbing appreciation of how the fate of a single honorable officer, swept up in a terrible conflict over which he had little control, mirrored that of his service and country. As chief of staff to Fleet Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Ugaki helped plan the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, an enterprise neither man supported wholeheartedly. Loyal to a fault, he rejoiced, albeit apprehensively, in Japan's early victories throughout East Asia. Then came setbacks at Midway, Guadalcanal, and elsewhere, which Ugaki knew could not easily be made up for. When US interceptors ambushed and killed Yamamoto, Ugaki was traveling in a second plane that also was shot down—but the warrior survived, recuperated, and eventually returned to sea. His flagship was shot out from under him, however, during the battle of Leyte Gulf. Back in Japan by the fall of 1944, Ugaki was chosen to direct naval efforts to provide the home islands with air defense. ``Special attack'' units—a euphemism for squadrons sent on suicide missions—were integral to this program. But while the kamikazes took a significant toll on American vessels, there was no stopping the Allies. When the end came after the two atom bombings, Ugaki defied his beloved emperor (who had instructed the Japanese military to lay down its arms) to keep faith with the hundreds of young men he had sent to their deaths. Shortly after the surrender broadcast, Ugaki flew from Kyushu toward Okinawa, where US night fighters on routine patrol shot him out of the sky before he could damage Allied ships. An insider's intriguing perspectives on an ill-starred belligerency, plus savvy commentary and continuity from a veteran military historian.
Pub Date: March 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-275-94067-5
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Praeger
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1993
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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