A straightforward, suitably plain-spoken account of the first dramatic months of a presidency that transformed America's world role. Moskin (The U.S. Marine Corps Story, not reviewed), a former foreign editor of Look magazine, focuses on the crisis with which Truman's presidency began—the sudden death of FDR and the accession of the inexperienced, poorly prepared vice president to the Oval Office just as WW II reached its denouement. Moskin points out that Truman made his share of mistakes, such as allowing Stalin to retain control over eastern Europe. However, Truman's decisiveness stopped the Soviets from dominating western Europe and Japan. Moskin shows that Truman's encounters with such strong egos from the Allied side as Churchill, de Gaulle, and Douglas MacArthur presented challenges almost as severe as his meetings with Stalin. About Truman's most controversial decision from this period, the determination to use the atomic bomb, Moskin sides with those who say it was necessary to prevent an even more costly invasion of Japan (although he does not offer a detailed argument). At this time of rapidly increasing tension between the US and the Soviet Union, Truman not only had to bring the world's most destructive war to a successful conclusion, but also had to grapple with such issues as the establishment of the United Nations and the beginning of the end of the British and French empires. Truman emerges as a resolutely honest, decisive, and plain-spoken chief executive who moved rapidly to put his own distinctive stamp on the job, unintimidated by the towering ghost of FDR. Truman was a dynamo of activity, somehow finding time to effect a thorough reorganization of the military and providing such entitlements as the GI Bill. In Moskin's portrait, Truman emerges as a man meeting the test of his life with courage, common sense, and great skill. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: July 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-40936-X
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1996
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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