A compassionate account of a dramatic incident in modern naval history, told with cinematic immediacy and narrative skill.
A riveting true tale of heroism and tragedy at sea.
On the morning of June 29, 1967, the US aircraft carrier Forrestal was preparing to launch a routine air raid against America's North Vietnamese enemies. The heaving deck was packed with fueled warplanes and a motley combination of old and new ordnance: Belgian-made Zuni rockets, leaky thousand-ton bombs of WWII vintage, Sparrow and Sidewinder missiles, and hundreds of other rockets and bombs. An instant after pilot John McCain (yes, that John McCain) gave the thumbs-up signal to his parachute rigger, he felt an enormous impact. A Zuni rocket had accidentally fired, gashing the side of McCain's plane and pouring hundreds of gallons of jet fuel onto the deck. Freelance journalist Freeman (Lay This Body Down, 1999) spares the reader no detail of the ensuing horror. First, fire engulfed the deck, then volatile WWII bombs “cooked off” in pools of jet fuel, triggering successive explosions from the munitions on the deck, blasting away sections of the ship, and wreaking bizarre damage on the bodies of the young men working there. Many died, while for those who survived to conquer the fire, just doing their jobs constituted unbelievable heroism. Freeman tells a few representative stories in detail. One kid stayed at his post at general quarters, alone, for five hours, because he'd been ordered to; three dying men, trapped in a steering compartment, uncomplainingly followed orders to transfer steering control before succumbing. In the end, 134 men died in the fire, and many survivors were left with haunting memories and crippling injuries. Incredibly, McCain survived with only minor wounds. Freeman blames the incident in large part on an electrical surge in the rockets and the use of old and faulty thousand-pound bombs, but leaves unclear whether the Navy's investigation of the fire, an unsatisfying combination of whitewash and scapegoating, taught it any enduring lessons.
A compassionate account of a dramatic incident in modern naval history, told with cinematic immediacy and narrative skill.Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-621267-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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