A sweeping, imaginative oral history of WWII from the American point of view. The shelves now overflow with one-volume histories of that war, books containing few speakers other than their authors, and with exhaustive official histories like Samuel Eliot Morison’s 20-volume account of the U.S. Marines in the Pacific Theater. Military historian Astor (Crisis in the Pacific, 1996, etc.), aiming for something of Morison’s completeness within the bounds of a single fat volume, succeeds by the thoughtful coupling of a narrative that touches on most of the war’s most important engagements with the reminiscences of hundreds of participants. For Pearl Harbor, he includes eyewitness accounts from sailors on sinking battleships, fighter pilots, and ordinary soldiers—all of them admitting to panic and confusion, especially after nightfall, when, in the words of one GI, —every wave that hit the beach we saw as another landing barge.— To relate the bloody assault on the Japanese-held Aleutian Islands in 1942, he draws on the memories of several participants, including one Army officer who wonders how it was that his unit, trained for desert combat in North Africa, had come to be deployed in the Arctic. (In one week that unit shrank from 1,000 to 200 men, with most of the losses due not to bullets but to cold.) And so on, and on, until final victory. Lacking the vivid storytelling skills of a Stephen Ambrose, Astor offers instead the most salient facts in what otherwise could have been an overwhelming mass of detail. He also turns up some surprises—for one, the reminiscences of American veterans of Jimmy Doolittle’s air raid on Tokyo, who crash-landed in the Soviet Union and were held prisoner there rather than being sent home. (They eventually escaped, but, on arriving in Washington, were ordered not to breathe a word of their exploits lest the Russians be offended.) Invaluable to historians, with much to interest general readers as well. (Maps and b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-89141-695-1
Page Count: 1056
Publisher: Presidio/Random
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1999
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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