A fast-moving, real-life escape story, and an unexpected chronicle of a fight against censorship.
Sports and military historian Lukacs tells the story of the only successful escape of a group of POWs from a Japanese prison camp during World War II.
Lukacs effectively conveys the horrors of life for American POWs in the Philippines. The central figure of the story, Maj. William Edwin Dyess of the Army Air Forces, was an ace fighter pilot who sunk numerous Japanese boats. He was one of thousands of prisoners in the infamous Bataan Death March, in which prisoners were marched with little or no food or water in blistering heat; many were randomly bayoneted or beheaded. At the prison camps, conditions were scarcely better; the Japanese refused to follow the Geneva Convention rules for prisoner treatment. Prison-guard duty was seen as a lowly assignment in the Japanese army, given to the worst soldiers, who took out their frustrations on the Americans in the most brutal ways imaginable. Occasionally, prisoners would try unsuccessfully to escape; once, when three escapees were recaptured, the guards tied them to stakes and beat them for three days before shooting them. Nonetheless, Dyess and nine others were determined to escape, and they slipped away during a work detail, trudging through miles of marshland infested with leeches, crocodiles and stinging wasps. They met up with sympathetic Filipino guerrillas, and after many delays, ably captured by Lukacs, they eventually made it to freedom. However, in a strange twist, Dyess and the others were ordered not to discuss their brutal prison treatment. Among other concerns, higher-ups in the U.S. government were worried about Japanese retaliatory action against American prisoners still in the Philippines. The author’s account of the escapees’ determination to break their silence is one of the most engaging parts of the book.
A fast-moving, real-life escape story, and an unexpected chronicle of a fight against censorship.Pub Date: May 11, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-7432-6278-1
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 30, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2010
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
