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
Occasionally unfocused, but redeems itself by putting a vivid, human face on an unimaginable nightmare.
A ground-level illustration of how the plague ravaged Europe.
For his tenth book, science writer Kelly (Three on the Edge, 1999, etc.) delivers a cultural history of the Black Death based on accounts left by those who witnessed the greatest natural disaster in human history. Spawned somewhere on the steppes of Central Asia, the plague arrived in Europe in 1347, when a Genoese ship carried it to Sicily from a trading post on the Black Sea. Over the next four years, at a time when, as the author notes, “nothing moved faster than the fastest horse,” the disease spread through the entire continent. Eventually, it claimed 25 million lives, one third of the European population. A thermonuclear war would be an equivalent disaster by today's standards, Kelly avers. Much of the narrative depends on the reminiscences of monks, doctors, and other literate people who buried corpses or cared for the sick. As a result, the author has plenty of anecdotes. Common scenes include dogs and children running naked, dirty, and wild through the streets of an empty village, their masters and parents dead; Jews burnt at the stake, scapegoats in a paranoid Christian world; and physicians at the University of Paris consulting the stars to divine cures. These tales give the author opportunities to show Europeans—filthy, malnourished, living in densely packed cities—as easy targets for rats and their plague-bearing fleas. They also allow him to ramble. Kelly has a tendency to lose the trail of the disease in favor of tangents about this or that king, pope, or battle. He returns to his topic only when he shifts to a different country or city in a new chapter, giving the book a haphazard feel. Remarkably, the story ends on a hopeful note. After so many perished, Europe was forced to develop new forms of technology to make up for the labor shortage, laying the groundwork for the modern era.
Occasionally unfocused, but redeems itself by putting a vivid, human face on an unimaginable nightmare.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-000692-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
From independent historian Beevor (coauthor, Paris After the Liberation, 1994, etc.), a meticulously researched and gripping account of the horrific battle that culminated in the collapse of Adolf Hitler’s blitzkrieg offensive in Russia, and ultimately ordained German defeat in WWII. In June 1941, when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, with a vast surprise attack comprising three large army groups, a quick defeat of the Red Army seemed probable if not inevitable: Germany’s massive blitzkrieg style of war had quickly subjugated Poland and France. But, as Beevor makes clear, Hitler never prepared his army adequately for war with the Russian behemoth, and the blitzkrieg petered out as the Russian winter closed in. Hitler delayed the attack on Moscow, and by the early spring of 1942, when General Friedrich Wilhelm Paulus assumed command of the Sixth Army, the combination of surprise and terror on which the Nazis had depended was lost. Despite strategic victories along the way, the objective, Stalingrad, proved elusive, and after Paulus’s repeated sanguinary assaults against the city proved ineffective, his position became a trap for thousands of German troops, few of whom survived the battle or the rigors of the Soviet gulag. Beevor is evenhanded in his treatment of the two sides: By contrasting the German and Soviet points of view, he conveys the experiences of Axis generals and fighting men (who comprised thousands of Romanian, Hungarian, and disaffected Russians as well as Germans) in the midst of a total war, and those of Soviet soldiers, who had to fear the NKVD and SMERSH, the Soviet intelligence services, as much as the Nazis. A painstakingly thorough study that will become a standard work on the battle of Stalingrad. (Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection/History Book Club main selection)
Pub Date: July 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-87095-1
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1998
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