This faithful, detailed expansion of a pilot’s journal will make a worthwhile addition to the library of any World War II...
Hook (Desert Storm Diary, 2013, etc.) sifts through the pieces of a World War II ace pilot’s life and death.
To form this story, Hook collects the wartime diary of Francis “Pinky” Register, a World War II Navy pilot from North Dakota, and contemporaneous articles, letters and reports; Hook also conducted his own extensive research and got considerable help from Register’s surviving brother, Bill. The end result is the story of Register’s life, from his aerial beginnings in Civil Aeronautics Association courses taught by Hook’s father to Register leaving his wife for life at sea just a few months after their wedding and his eventual death in aerial combat on the Aleutian island of Attu. Hook isn’t shy about becoming part of the story, discussing his research process and occasionally inserting brief personal anecdotes, such as his father’s 1939 prediction that scrap metal sent to Japan would soon come back at the United States. Hook’s presence as tour guide gives him a chance to explain the greater context that Register’s diaries don’t always address, orienting readers to the significance of the battles Register fought over Guadalcanal and Attu. Register’s many close calls, including bluffing his way past enemy fighters when his guns ran empty, bring home the fact that skill and bravado weren’t enough to make an ace fighter pilot. Luck was essential, too, and Register had plenty of it. This work is undeniably engaging up until the moment Hook inserts his own political and cultural views: e.g., “I don’t see [pride] in our liberal colleges and universities where teachers who have never been exposed to the real evils that are out there in the world pass on their ignorant philosophies to our youth.” That line of thought may be off-putting to those who don’t share the author’s views, but after a few pages, he returns to his coverage of Register’s story. The material is researched and verified, although some historians may cringe at the repeated use of Wikipedia as an authoritative source.
This faithful, detailed expansion of a pilot’s journal will make a worthwhile addition to the library of any World War II buff.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1492881704
Page Count: 272
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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