An often powerful examination of a jailbreak plot and the moral complexities of wartime.
A seasoned military journalist investigates the history and aftermath of an attempted escape from a North Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camp in this nonfiction work.
Hayward first met Bill Baugh, the chief of public affairs at Colorado’s Falcon Air Force Station, in 1990 when the author was a 25-year-old Air Force sergeant. As their relationship developed, Baugh—a Vietnam veteran, a former POW, and a “fighter pilot with a resume that would make Rambo bow”—told the author the harrowing story of John Dramesi and Ed Atterberry’s dramatic escape from a Hanoi POW camp in 1969. Years later, as a staff writer for Airman Magazine, Hayward wrote an investigative piece on the escape, but it was rejected by his editors, he says, because the story’s complexities couldn’t be contained in the magazine format. Now, decades later and after multiple interviews with those involved with the attempted escape, the author offers readers a definitive history of it. Imprisoned in a former French movie studio known as Cu Loc (or “the Zoo,” as the prisoners called it), Dramesi and Atterberry managed the seemingly impossible—breaking out of a heavily fortified facility in the heart of North Vietnam—only to be subsequently recaptured. The dramatic event (code-named “The Party” by the inmates) is expertly retold in Hayward’s gripping narrative, but what makes this book special is its exploration of the POW’s struggles with moral complexities. Those who participated in the Party plan, Hayward says, believed it was their duty to escape—even if it jeopardized the lives of fellow prisoners; others had a different reading of the U.S. military’s code of conduct, believing that such an attempt would violate its mandates. (Even in the military’s black-and-white world, Hayward effectively notes, “there was a lot of gray.”) The book’s engaging prose takes readers deep into the heart of day-to-day prison life, ranging from long spells of monotony to bursts of extreme violence. It’s accompanied by an ample assortment of maps, photographs, newspaper clippings, and drawings by former POWs.
An often powerful examination of a jailbreak plot and the moral complexities of wartime.Pub Date: March 25, 2021
ISBN: 979-8673366219
Page Count: 251
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2023
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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