Perfect for military enthusiasts and Hollywood screenwriters.
A founding member’s memoir of soldiering in the Army’s antiterrorism unit.
Developed in the late 1970s, the Delta Force is so secretive that it’s surprising retired Sergeant Major Haney was permitted to write this account. The narrative’s first half describes the qualities required for membership (a combination of Bond-esque savvy and Rambo-esque strength), Haney’s “selection,” and his training. The selection process demanded physical and mental endurance. Participants had to complete 18-mile and 40-mile marches to qualify for a unit about whose actual activities they had only the vaguest knowledge. Haney, already a happy career soldier, found his niche in this environment. He was comfortable with uncertainty, professional about completing his tasks, and demanding of himself. In training, he learned the skills of an assassin. Delta Force operators practiced storming terrorist-held buildings and shooting terrorists without injuring hostages. Once acquired, these skills took Haney all over the world. The Delta Force planned and attempted a rescue of Iranian hostages that was botched by faulty Navy aircraft. Haney worked on the American Ambassador’s security detail in Lebanon just before the embassy there was bombed. He helped rescue missionaries in Sudan, participated in guerilla warfare in Honduras, and stormed the island of Grenada. These exploits, though sensational in their danger, become somewhat rote in the retelling. Whereas the early chapters are driven by the force of Haney’s deepening love affair with the Army, later events seem stagnant despite all the derring-do. Once the uncertainty of selection and training are finished, a soldierly professionalism takes over. As Haney puts it, “No posturing, no sloganeering, no high fives, no posing, no bluster, and no bombast. Just a quiet determination to get the job done.” That same creed permeates his book: doubts, fears, and emotion are subdued in favor of action.
Perfect for military enthusiasts and Hollywood screenwriters.Pub Date: May 21, 2002
ISBN: 0-385-33603-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
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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