A tenacious personal memoir that sets a little-known record straight for the author.
A Vietnam War veteran’s diligent investigation of the 1968 attack on swift boat PCF-19, which concludes that the U.S. government erred in ruling the vessel and its passengers victims of friendly fire.
One can’t help but admire Steffes’s efforts to make sense of what he experienced during his first summer as a swift boat sailor along the border between North and South Vietnam. On June 15, 1968, he watched his fellow Swifties aboard PCF-19 sail up the coast toward the DMZ on a routine mission, only to discover by the early minutes of the next day that they had been attacked–four of the sailors had been killed and one was missing. A Board of Inquiry determined it was the result of friendly fire, but Steffes was not satisfied with the verdict. After a career in the Navy and more than 30 years of wanting to uncover the truth, Steffes sought to reverse what he alludes to as a politically motivated verdict. His investigation is more impressive than his delivery. The author uses the Internet, declassified Naval Archive records and interviews with eyewitnesses to, he hopes, correct history. In search of what really happened, Steffes took trips to veterans’ conventions and even returned to Vietnam with fellow sailors to try and make sense of the incident. He fully explains the role of the swift boats in missions, as well as corrects the illogical conclusion of the boat’s attack. Steffes’s is a moving story, both the experience at the scene in 1968 and his subsequent quest for the truth. But the book’s narrative is too often interrupted by reproduced documentary evidence, military terminology and errors in grammar and spelling. Swift Boat Down’s most valid contribution is its vivid description of a Swifty’s mission and Steffes’s take on the truth, which boosts his fellow sailors from hapless victims to war heroes. In order to understand the jargon and geography, however, the lay reader would need a list of military abbreviations and a Vietnam map for reference.
A tenacious personal memoir that sets a little-known record straight for the author.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2005
ISBN: 978-1-5992-6613-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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