Not a pretty story, nor prettily told. But few will deny that the dogs deserve this tribute.
Acrid memoir of infantry days spent in Vietnam from 1966 to 1968.
Four thousand dogs served in Vietnam for the American military. They were prizes for any unit, writes scout-dog handler Burnam in the gruff voice used throughout his text; sharp sensory equipment combined with extensive training gave them the jump on ambushes, booby traps, and kindred nasty battlefield situations. The first half of this work chronicles Burnam’s introduction to Vietnam—the clueless enlistee “had no idea there was a war going on in Vietnam or where that country was located on the globe”—providing a low-key but brisk primer on what it is like to be dropped into tropical landscapes to encounter people who want to kill you and work very hard to do so. (He will undoubtedly alienate some readers with his use of the term “Charlie,” but this seemingly derogatory nickname for “these fierce and savvy Asian warriors” comes as part of his rough packaging.) Luckily, Burnam managed to run a sharpened piece of bamboo through his knee rather than be killed, which certainly looked like his destiny. Recovering from that incident, he received training in dog-handling and then reenlisted for another tour of combat, a step for which he can provide no justification. The second half details his experiences on the battlefield with two German shepherds: Timber (“a grumpy draftee,” notes Burnam, tipping his hat to the dog’s native intelligence) and Clipper, who together saw the infantryman through traumatic combat shock, minefields, and intense battle fire. The dogs’ quick intelligence saved Burnam and his comrades’ bacon more than once. What thanks were they given? Fewer than 200 were shipped home, the remainder euthanized or slaughtered for food. The author and the Vietnam Dog Handler Association are seeking to acknowledge their contributions with a monument of their own.
Not a pretty story, nor prettily told. But few will deny that the dogs deserve this tribute.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7867-1137-X
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2003
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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