The annals of an US Army airborne unit whose fine showing in WW II was often superior to that of more celebrated outfits. Drawing on extensive interviews with surviving veterans as well as on archival sources, Astor (A Blood-Dimmed Tide, 1992, etc.) delivers a tellingly detailed account of the 517th Regimental Combat Team's 33-month life span. After providing background data on the wartime use of paratroops, he follows the RCT from its tough but somewhat chaotic training regimen in the backwoods of Georgia through its formal deactivation in 1946. After shipping out for the European theater, the 517th gave a fine account of itself in five major campaigns. It first hiked (not jumped) into battle north of Rome in mid-1944. Subsequently dropped into southern France, the regiment went on to fight bravely in the Rhineland, the Ardennes (in the Battle of the Bulge), and the Buertgen Forest, meanwhile earning a Congressional Medal of Honor, six Distinguished Service Crosses, and nearly 1,600 Purple Hearts (at the cost of 244 killed). Astor (who served as an infantryman in the ETO) devotes almost as much attention to the hard-nosed team's out-of-action antics as he does to its valor and sacrifices under fire, providing valuable perspectives on what gave the 517th (whose never-approved shoulder patch featured an irate vulture) remarkable esprit de corps during its relatively short-lived, albeit immensely productive, existence. An absorbing, informative take on how the American military once managed to make elite forces of a few professionals and hordes of citizen-soldiers. (Maps, 16 pages of b&w photographs—not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 10, 1993
ISBN: 1-55611-363-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Donald Fine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1993
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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