Perhaps the most controversial military operation of the Vietnam War was the US Army's May 1, 1970, assault on previously sacrosanct Communist bases and supply dumps in Cambodia. All but ignored in most accounts, however, are the events leading up to the cross-border foray. Coleman (Pleiku, 1988) bridges this gap effectively and instructively with a wide-ranging overview of the battleground and of the diplomatic and home-front maneuvering that took place during the 28 months between the Tet Offensive of 1968 and the incursion. A decorated combat veteran of the clashes he chronicles, the author recounts how the interdiction strategies employed by Gen. Creighton Abrams in connection with the pacification programs initiated by William Colby (then a CIA station chief) forced the North Vietnam Army to move its materiel stockpiles from sites around Saigon into putatively neutral Cambodia. With peace negotiations stalled in Paris and a phased reduction in American troops already underway, the Nixon Administration approved bombing these hitherto inviolate havens, eventually okaying an air/ground attack as well. In Coleman's view, though, the President squandered US advantage by publicly limiting the raid to 60 days and its thrust to 30 kilometers beyond the frontier. He also argues that the war's outcome could have proved very different had allied commanders instituted an interdiction/pacification campaign by 1967. Even so, the author reckons, the curtailed invasion (which denied NVA troops a wealth of ammunition, medical supplies, weapons, and training facilities) bought the Thieu regime two extra years. Authoritative and accessible. The frequently gripping text includes eight pages of photos and a like number of maps (not seen).
Pub Date: Aug. 23, 1991
ISBN: 0-312-05877-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1991
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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