Military buffs will lap it up, but general readers may find it difficult to resist the tension, drama and fireworks of this...
Using voluminous official records plus interviews and an amazing number of unpublished diaries and letters, former Charleston Post and Courier investigative reporter Scott (The Attack on the Liberty: The Untold Story of Israel's Deadly 1967 Assault on a U.S. Spy Ship, 2009) delivers a gripping, almost day-by-day account of the actions of three submarines, Silversides, Tang and Drum, from Pearl Harbor to VE Day.
Nazi U-boats get the publicity, but America’s submarines were more effective, sinking so many Japanese vessels that by the end of World War II, civilians were starving and factories barely functioning. The author mixes biographies of the men who fought in the subs, technical details of sub warfare and the patrols themselves. Moving back and forth among the three boats, he describes weeks of boredom and searching, days of maneuvering for attacks, the devastation when they were successful, the frustration when they weren’t and the anxiety of enduring depth-charge attacks while trapped deep beneath the sea. All this havoc on Japanese shipping came at a price; American submarines suffered 20 percent losses, the highest of any Navy service. That included the Tang, sunk, ironically, by its own malfunctioning torpedo, killing most of its crew. The nine survivors emerged as malnourished skeletons after a year of unspeakable conditions in Japanese prisons. Scott pauses regularly to explain the progress of the Pacific war but makes no attempt to write a general history of the submarine campaign; for that, read Clay Blair’s Silent Victory (1975). Inevitably, details of several dozen submarine patrols become increasingly familiar.
Military buffs will lap it up, but general readers may find it difficult to resist the tension, drama and fireworks of this underappreciated but dazzlingly destructive American weapon of WWII.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4391-7683-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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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