A superb contribution to the literature of WWII.
Or, Rosie the Riveter reconsidered.
In this lively, smart, sometimes contrarian work of social history, New York Times writer Yellin explores the manifold roles of women in WWII: nurses, musicians, athletes, pilots, homemakers, factory workers, political activists, even prostitutes. In doing so, she turns up intriguing observations about a society turned on its head by the all-encompassing conflict. When war came, she writes of one such transformation, “warnings to young women started coming with a fury . . . from parents, from the clergy, on the radio, in newspapers and magazines” urging them not to give in to the temptations of wartime romance—for why pin your happiness to a boy who might soon die? The young women didn’t listen, and “despite the naysaying, 1.8 million couples married in 1942, a huge increase from the year before.” When the men did go off to war, the women remade the home front, enduring plenty of psychic shocks along the way (such as having to go back to living with their parents in order to economize). They faced great opposition, and their contributions were not always fairly rewarded: though the Army and Navy offered equal pay in plants they controlled, most civilian contractors paid women less than men (“by 1944,” Yellin writes, “the average weekly wage for female factory workers was $31 . . . while it was $55 a week for men”). Many jobs were not open to women at all, especially those close to combat zones; only about half of Army nurses went overseas, whereas fewer than one in ten Navy nurses did so until late in the war. In a superb moment among many high points, Yellin relates the strange and sad tale of “Tokyo Rose.” In another, she traces the invention of “Betty Crocker.” In still another, she revisits the moment when the single vote against declaration of war on Japan was cast in Congress: “As a woman,” said Rep. Jeanette Rankin, “I can’t go to war and I refuse to send anyone else.”
A superb contribution to the literature of WWII.Pub Date: May 4, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-4514-8
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2004
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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