A well-researched, generally disinterested account whose parallels to today are obvious.
A journalist provides a balanced look at America’s bloody effort to annex the Philippines in the early 20th century.
Former Dallas Morning News correspondent Jones (Red Revolution: Inside the Philippine Guerrilla Movement, 1989) gives both sides to the issues and their adherents—though he begins with a graphic description of American soldiers administering water torture to a Filipino captive (the issue of military misconduct recurs repeatedly). Jones swiftly summarizes the war with Spain that gave birth to the events in the Philippines, paying careful attention to rising star Theodore Roosevelt and his exploits with the Rough Riders. We see President William McKinley as something of a ditherer; he was reluctant to make decisions that he knew would cost lives. Once Spain agreed to surrender their sway in the Philippines, the Americans snatched the chance for expansion. President Roosevelt was no ditherer. The Filipinos, initially grateful, quickly realized that they were not going to retain sovereignty, and an insurgency swelled. Soon thousands of American military personnel flooded the islands, and the action turned brutal, sanguinary and punitive. Torture, executions, destruction of private property and the burning of entire villages—all were done by the U.S. in the cause of victory. Jones describes the incidents, chronicles the reactions back home (Mark Twain and Andrew Carnegie were passionately opposed to U. S. involvement) and charts the flight of the political football as Republicans and Democrats fought to control the public perception of events. One major result was the elevated status of the Marines, whose days had seemed numbered beforehand.
A well-researched, generally disinterested account whose parallels to today are obvious.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-451-22904-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: NAL/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2011
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 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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