An unremarkable glimpse into the remarkable lives of several Vietnam-era draft resisters who fled north. Freelance journalist Dickerson opens his book by protesting a little too loudly that the young people of today, who have no direct memory of the Vietnam years, don’t properly appreciate “one of the most traumatic periods in American history. Those who do have clear memories are now in their late 40s and 50s, a sizable segment of the population, but hardly one that fits the sell, sell, sell demographics of today’s youth-oriented news and entertainment media.” Those youngsters may in fact have a hard time seeing in Dickerson’s half-dozen chief profile subjects the fiery radicals of yesteryear, now resident in Canada for a quarter of a century and long comfortably settled into grownup careers: one is a policy analyst for the Asian Development Bank, another the director general of the Institutions and Social Statistics Branch of the Canadian government, still another is an economic researcher employed by the public sector. Dickerson is good at placing the resisters and the Canadian government’s attitude toward them in historical context: half a million Americans, he writes, moved to Canada legally and illegally as a result of the Vietnam-era draft, “one the largest mass exoduses in history of Americans emigrating from their homeland.” For all that, his book relies on narratives that are not especially revealing; his subjects, to all appearances, simply decided the war was wrong, picked up and moved north, and got on with their lives without, it would appear, much personal sacrifice. It would have been better had Dickerson sought out more thoughtful and politically engaged critics of American policy in Vietnam, and had he cast a wider net to find a more representative range of subjects.
Pub Date: March 31, 1999
ISBN: 0-275-96211-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Praeger
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
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
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