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MESSENGERS OF THE LOST BATTALION

THE HEROIC 551ST AND THE TURNING OF THE TIDE AT THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE

A son's record of his long, wide-ranging search to uncover his dead father's army experiences during WW II. Poet and historian Orfalea attended the first reunion of the 551st Battalion, hoping to find out something about his father, but discovered many mysteries instead. Why was this heroic airborne unit sent to its destruction against a well-entrenched German unit, and why were their achievements ignored in military history? During the Battle of the Bulge, with few other units not already pinned down or shattered, the 551st was sent against fanatically determined German forces in a counterattack that lasted five days, blunted a part of the German assault, took hundreds of prisoners, and left only 110 of the battalion's 643 soldiers standing when it ended. Despite this extraordinary record, the unit was disbanded, its records were destroyed, its bravery went unrecognized, and its very existence was swiftly forgotten by the army bureaucracy. Orfalea's investigations reveal the men of the 551st to have been exuberant loners, distrustful of authority; many had served time in the military stockade. Unattached to other Allied forces, they were, in many ways, seen as a rowdy, defiant bunch and thus, perhaps, dispensable. Despite the army's neglect, the unit received the Croix de Guerre from Charles de Gaulle, and a monument was erected to them by the Belgians in recognition of their heroic efforts. Orfalea, who writes vividly and with great detail about the men of the 551st and their battles, asserts that the army, ever reluctant to acknowledge past injustice in the ranks, is still unwilling (despite the entreaties of 551st survivors and several generals) to recognize the unit's remarkable achievement. A fine military history of a heroic, hitherto forgotten unit finally brought to light.

Pub Date: March 14, 1997

ISBN: 0-684-82804-9

Page Count: 432

Publisher: Free Press

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1997

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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