Predictable tribute searches for revelations, finds nostalgia.
A close encounter with six WWII vets, all good friends and self-made men.
Turncoat liberal Stein’s (How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, 2000, etc.) father-in-law, Moe Turner, provided him with entrée into this band of aging buddies in Monterey, California, who for the past 35 years have met weekly, usually at lunch, to ruminate and one-up each other on the life well-lived. (Or, as they would probably express it, to “shoot the BS.”) Probing the motives and principles that defined them, the author interlopes in order to frame key questions: What was it like to kill somebody? Were you scared? What about sex? Stein then annotates the group’s responses, which often express considerable discomfort and a covert desire to get the inquisition over, with his own pervasive subtext: Why would society meander away from such a productive value system? While everybody admires the guts of the guys who saved the world from Hitler and Tojo, Stein suggests, almost nobody today adheres to the same high standards of honor, duty, and responsibility that drove them. Apart from the war, the author further admires these individuals for their response to stress and adversity in other situations. He effectively points out that few have ever really stopped to think about how hard it was for someone returning from the war, having lost four irreplaceable years or so, to start all over again in a career, a marriage, a family. The role of faux naiveté Stein dons can be annoying, lending heaviness to an ongoing sense of book-making gears grinding away. But he is at least appropriately celebratory about the pleasure of being able to spend a couple of hours a week in the company of those who abstain from political correctness.
Predictable tribute searches for revelations, finds nostalgia.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-621172-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
