A welcome piece of military history, adroitly balancing racism and legal questions in one story.
An Emmy-winning journalist sets the record straight about the death of an Italian POW during WWII.
First-time author Hamann came across the name Guglielmo Olivotto when he discovered a unique grave featuring a broken Roman column, one of several “unusual objects,” he was told, on the grounds of a former Army base in Seattle’s Discovery Park. The headstone nagged at the author, who eventually learned that Olivotto had been murdered during a riot that led to one of the biggest courts-martial in the history of the Army. In August 1944, after weeks of American soldiers’ grumbling about how the Italians were being mollycoddled, a throng of black enlisted men attacked some of the 200 Italian prisoners being held at the base. Most of the rioters and Italians suffered scrapes and bruises. Olivotto, however, was found dead—hanging from a cable on the base’s obstacle course, as if he had been lynched. Hamann cites declassified documents, court transcripts and interviews to show how the segregated Army compromised justice so that black soldiers were pinned to the crime, leaving possible white suspects overlooked. Particularly damning is the way military police performed during and after the riot. Their main goal, Hamann suggests, was to forestall more trouble, rather than collect evidence that might solve a murder involving African-Americans and a captured enemy soldier. In a welcome addition to military history, the author sheds light on the circumstances of Italian POWs in the United States (many of whom enjoyed confinement because they never wanted to serve in Mussolini's army in the first place), but the courtroom drama that makes up much of the second half reads less easily. Even so, Hamann does an excellent job of humanizing the two opposing lawyers in the case, including Leon Jaworski, who later became a confidant of Lyndon Johnson’s, though readers may feel tested by the seemingly endless parade of names and details resulting from Hamann’s meticulous research.
A welcome piece of military history, adroitly balancing racism and legal questions in one story.Pub Date: April 29, 2005
ISBN: 1-56512-394-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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