A compelling memoir mixed with original historical research leading to fresh interpretations of the permanent war culture.
The latest entry in the publisher’s War Culture series, this one from a veteran cultural historian who writes that “since early childhood America’s wars [have] been defining historical periods in my life.”
Following his years as an Air Force navigator and intelligence officer and consequent support of American wars, Franklin (Emeritus, English and American Studies/Univ. of Rutgers-Newark; The Most Important Fish in the Sea: Menhaden and America, 2007, etc.), now in his mid-80s, has established a reputation as an anti-war scholar. After his military service, the author got a doctorate in English and taught literature at Stanford University (where he was fired for inciting anti-war protests) and Rutgers. Gradually, he and his wife became immersed in pacifist politics as they learned searing truths about U.S. military involvement in Vietnam despite government lies meant to obscure the duration of the war, the body counts, and the actual objectives of American foreign policy. Franklin sagely notes how U.S. involvement in Vietnam actually began during the 1940s rather than the 1960s. As a result, he writes, the country he used to love uncritically has been at war abroad without interruption since World War II—truly a “Forever War.” President Harry Truman’s decision to drop atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki vastly increased the stakes of the forever war reality. Franklin’s own military service allowed him access to pertinent information about mistakes with nuclear weaponry that could have resulted in massive death tolls and radiation sickness, and he ably conveys this to readers. In addition to revelations about the Vietnam War, the author offers a persuasive alternative account of U.S. military and civilian wrongdoing in the Korean War. Although he could have adopted a shrill tone given his upsetting evidence, the author writes in a low-key, graceful style, teaching clearly along the way.
A compelling memoir mixed with original historical research leading to fresh interpretations of the permanent war culture.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-978800-91-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Rutgers Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
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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