An all-encompassing examination of the history of American POWs in Vietnam. Veith, a former army officer, sheds much-needed light on the history of American POWs in Southeast Asia. Using recently declassified wartime POW material, and extensive interviews with former POWs and those who worked to rescue them, Veith includes many, many details on how dozens of Americans were captured, how they fared in captivity, and how they tried to escape, were released, or died in captivity. The heart of the book is a close examination of the military's efforts to find the POWs in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam and free them during the war. Veith provides an illuminating (if at times overwritten and acronym-clogged) road map of an effort that began with various military Search-and-Rescue (SAR) teams and the covert Studies and Observation Group (SOG), which worked behind enemy lines. In 1966 the SOG and SAR POW duties were folded into a new unit, the Joint Personnel Recovery Center (JPRC), sometimes referred to by the unclassified code name Bright Light. As Veith shows, the often courageous and heroic work by these men came to naught. The Americans freed some 500 South Vietnamese POWs and recovered 110 American bodies, but not one captured American was rescued from an enemy camp. The many reasons for that failure included intraservice rivalries, intelligence breakdowns, and high-level political intransigence, especially in supposedly neutral Laos, where the Americans were waging a so-called ``secret war.'' Veith briefly addresses the heated issue of whether all American POWs were returned in 1973 and provides some food for thought about men left behind, primarily in Laos. But Veith's main task, and one at which he succeeds very well, is to offer a much-needed historial look at the vast array of efforts undertaken to recover American POWs during the war.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-83514-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1997
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 Yorkerstaff 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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