Astor (Operation Iceberg, 1995, etc.) has garnered extensive testimony from veterans of the bloody struggles for the Philippines, a strategic prize in WW II. Drawing on these powerful first-person accounts, Astor argues that the US suffered a ``second Pearl Harbor'' in the Philippine Islands during December 1941. The Filipino- American defenses were shockingly unprepared, despite General Douglas MacArthur's warnings of imminent attack. American forces had obsolete tanks, guns, and planes, and no reserves of ammunition. Despite these handicaps, many US units and the gallant and highly professional Filipino scouts fought bravely against veteran Japanese troops. Hungry, racked by disease, despairing, they fought on. Astor vividly depicts the fall of Bataan and Corregidor, the infamous Death March (during which many American POWS were murdered), and the atrocities carried out by the Japanese against Filipino civilians. (At the postwar trials of Japanese officers it was asserted that 131,028 Filipions and Americans were murdered during the Japanese occupation.) Astor is critical of MacArthur's misleading and self-serving reports about the Japanese invasion and of his false promises of reinforcements to his troops and their allies. The American return to the islands in 1944 was a different story: The avenging Allies came with overwhelming land, sea, and air power. Despite that, it was a long, brutal campaign. Judging from these stirring accounts by the men in combat, the Allied infantrymen and airmen and the Scouts (Filipino-American guerrillas) were truly heroes. MacArthur ultimately redeemed himself, returning to the Philippines, ousting an entrenched enemy, and earning a great victory under trying circumstances. Astor's latest contribution to the literature of WW II pays tribute to the little-known exploits, the sacrifices, and the valor of fighting men and reminds us that those who defend freedom may incur a terrible cost.
Pub Date: May 20, 1996
ISBN: 1-55611-484-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Donald Fine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1996
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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