A sturdy, often affecting memoir of service on and off an American submarine in WW II's Pacific theater. A retired vice admiral and sometime superintendent of the Naval Academy, Calvert recalls joining the USS Jack as a newly married ensign almost fresh out of Annapolis. On its maiden voyage in the waters off Tokyo, the Jack sent at least four Japanese cargo vessels to the bottom despite severe engine damage from an escort's attack. Power-plant woes forced the Jack to cut short its second war patrol. By early 1944, however, a complete refit equipped the ship for battle in the South China Sea; in this target-rich venue, it sank six more enemy craft, including four oil tankers. The Jack went on to compile a record that placed it ninth on the list of the 200-odd US submarines operating against Japan (in terms of tonnage sunk). In addition to engagements with hostile forces, Calvert had to survive a moral crisis. On the first of his shore leaves Down Under he fell deeply in love with the daughter of a local doctor. They eventually decided it would not be right to continue the unconsummated affair at the cost of the author's marriage. Calvert narrates this brief, bittersweet encounter with a sure touch that suggests not quite all is fair in love and war. When two atomic blasts (for which he remains perdurably grateful) accelerated the arrival of V-J day, the war-weary author was on his eighth patrol as executive officer of a new sub, the Haddo. After he and his shipmates escaped courts-martial for an unauthorized tour of defeated Japan's capital city, they were homeward bound, in Calvert's case, to continue his military career in a putatively peaceful world. A standout in a genre notable for first-rate entries. (18 b&w photos, charts)
Pub Date: Nov. 17, 1995
ISBN: 0-471-12778-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995
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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