Eyewitness accounts by combat survivors of early battles of the Pacific, interspersed with lucid commentary by the author, recounting how green American and veteran Australian troops stopped the seemingly invincible Japanese army in mid-1942 in Guadalcanal and New Guinea. (For an account of one American's war in the South Pacific, see Peter Richmond, My Father's War, p. 672.) Military historian Bergerud (Lincoln Univ.; Red Thunder, Tropic Lightning, 1993) captures the reality of life in the firing pits for untested Allied soldiers opposing an experienced, ruthless enemy with a reputation for cruelty. The South Pacific, Bergerud reminds us, was a terrible place to fight a war, with its dense and dangerous jungles, extreme heat and humidity, and frequent torrential rains. Diseases like malaria, dengue fever, scrub typhus, and dystentery took as high a toll as combat. Battles were fought at very close quarters, often by small units led by captains, lieutenants, and sergeants, not generals. Bergerud rates General MacArthur, despite flaws, as a great strategic leader, and the Australian army as the best infantry in the South Pacific. In addition, the First Marine Division, with many underage youngsters, fought with great endurance and bravery, and increasing skill, at Guadalcanal. Nevertheless, Bergerud notes that the army greatly outnumbered marines in the South Pacific and did far more of the fighting, despite the general impression created by the outstanding marine publicity machine. In the later central Pacific campaigns, on the other hand, the marines were in fact responsible for some sanguinary victories. The author discusses in detail the daily life of the soldiers and the weaponry and tactics central to the dreadful process of combat. According to Bergerud, the growing Japanese emphasis on fighting to the end resulted in a ``take no prisoners'' attitude by the Allies. Victory in the South Pacific in 194243 was, Bergerud persuasively argues, the first crucial step in bringing the war home to the Japanese and thereby ending it. One of the best books about WW II, capturing both the powerful if narrow view of the combat soldier and the panoramic vantage point of the military historian. (8 pages b&w photos, 8 maps)
Pub Date: July 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-670-86158-8
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1996
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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