A stark confrontation, but also rich in evocative anecdotal material that recalls the war in the Pacific with amazing...
Some 60 years after their suppression by military censorship, a Pulitzer Prize correspondent’s lost Nagasaki files remain potentially explosive.
Working from smudged carbons, long presumed lost but found after his father’s death at 95 three years ago, Anthony Weller has recreated, edited and annotated a body of reports that retain the capacity to shock the American public and foment controversy. They offer a grimly graphic picture of devastation fresh from the Kyushu city where the second atomic bomb detonated in war had effectively ended one, but with curious—even provocative—details of the blast’s effect and (from an American perspective) effectiveness. For example, hundreds of American prisoners exposed to the fireball at and near Ground Zero survived with no ill effects by lying flat in a simple slit trench. Also captured are vast firsthand details of inhumane treatment inflicted on American POWs by both Japanese military and civilian authorities (the latter in overseeing slave labor). Principally at issue: Why were almost all of George Weller’s dispatches, filed weeks after Japan had agreed to surrender, blacked out by military censors under General Douglas MacArthur? Author father and editor son weave a range of intriguing possibilities, including the plausible desire to keep any and all details surrounding the War’s ultimate secret weapon under wraps, as well as quelling inflammatory recriminations that might complicate a smooth postwar reconstruction. The senior Weller, however, died convinced that MacArthur was obsessed with keeping his personal Pacific victory intact, and that he didn’t want to share credit with a weapon engineered and delivered without his knowledge or assent; and, even more damning, that he covered up his administration’s failure to deliver necessary medical supplies and treatment for weeks after the blast, thus accounting for a substantial portion of up to 40,000 Nagasaki dead.
A stark confrontation, but also rich in evocative anecdotal material that recalls the war in the Pacific with amazing immediacy.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-307-34201-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
