A journalist's recollection of reporting in Vietnam—and its force in shaping his consciousness. ``I must have been the greenest reporter who ever set foot in Vietnam,'' declares former Los Angeles Times reporter Leslie, who arrived there in 1972, less than four years out of Yale. But his stint soon imprinted ``the mark''—a journalistic addiction to drama and righteous conflict that eventually helped him ``solve the mystery of my life.'' This is mostly a conventional, if interesting, recounting of war correspondence, written in numerous brief scenes. The young reporter experienced combat (he suffered a minor wound), battled with office-bound editors questioning his objectivity, and grew skeptical of bureaucratic pronouncements on American progress. Leslie offers some intriguing reflection on the murky process of trusting sources and the impossibility of conveying Vietnam's complexity to faraway readers. Intermittently, he inserts flashbacks from his past: During his joyless childhood in a solitary Beverly Hills family, he felt sympathy for ``voiceless sufferers,'' and only politics provoked real conversation between his parents. ``A loner who hated to be alone,'' he picked up prostitutes and dabbled in drugs in Vietnam. Along the way, Leslie learned some lessons: A refugee woman was offered $100 in exchange for having her picture taken. Although the money ``was more than the woman could hope to earn in a year,'' she refused because she considered it an invasion of her privacy. She remains Leslie's ``model of integrity.'' Expelled from South Vietnam for airing a local scandal, he went to Cambodia and eventually covered the American pullout. In a very brief epilogue, the author relates that he discovered Eastern philosophy, yoga, and therapy, began a family, and ultimately found a pattern in his path from troubled childhood to Indochinese epiphany. But until that late point, his personal trauma has been lost in long stretches of reporting; readers need more about his successful transformation. Good snapshots rather than a coherent moving picture. (12 pages photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: March 16, 1995
ISBN: 1-56858-024-6
Page Count: 300
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
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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