The low-key memoir of an American fighter pilot who achieved ace status in two wars. Gabreski, the son of Polish immigrants who settled in Pennsylvania, nearly flunked out of Notre Dame but was nonetheless recruited by the Army Air Corps. In 1941, he was posted to Hawaii, where he lived through the attack on Pearl Harbor. Eager for action, Gabreski talked the Pentagon into assigning him to a Polish RAF squadron in England; he subsequently became the ETO's top ace, with 28 confirmed kills in 17 months of aerial combat. On the day the author was scheduled to return home to a hero's welcome, he flew one last mission and was shot down—and spent the last ten months of WW II behind the wire of a POW camp. Back in the States before V-J Day, Gabreski married his longtime sweetheart and left the military for a sales job at Douglas Aircraft. After almost two years of civilian life, however, he reenlisted with the rank of lieutenant colonel. Following a brief sojourn as a test pilot, Gabreski was sent to Korea in 1951 as a wing commander. Flying F-86 Sabrejets, he was credited with downing more than six enemy planes, making him a double ace. Retiring in 1967 as a full colonel, the author accepted an executive post with Grumman, where (save for a hectic two-year stint as the politically appointed president of the Long Island Railroad) he remained for the next 20 years. Gabreski devotes most of his understated text to matter-of- fact accounts of his combat experiences, leaving readers to speculate on just what made him such a deadly dogfighter. There's also a rather full roll call of erstwhile comrades in arms, most of whom add little to the narrative. These cavils apart, an often ingratiating memoir. (Sixteen pages of photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-517-57801-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1991
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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