An expertly researched addition to the military history/biography genre.
A new World War II history from a stalwart in the genre.
Plenty of niches remain to be explored in WWII history; Wukovits (Soldiers of a Different Cloth: Notre Dame Chaplains in World War II, 2018), who specializes in finding them, has found another. Military buffs will be grateful. The author begins with accounts of two promising young men—Billy Hoggs, a bright farmer’s son, and Eugene Mandeberg, a scholarly city dweller—who responded to American entry into the war by volunteering as naval aviators. After more than a year of highly technical and dangerous training, their unit arrived off the coast of Japan in July 1945. By then, no one doubted that the Allies had won, but since enemy leaders continued to proclaim that they would fight to the death, American forces concentrated on softening up Japan for a massive invasion scheduled for the end of the year. This was extremely dangerous work. Japan’s once-vaunted air force barely existed, but anti-aircraft defenses were stronger than ever. Wukovits delivers gripping nuts-and-bolts descriptions of the group’s missions over the following month. The atomic bomb destroyed Hiroshima on Aug. 6. The soldiers on the aircraft carrier in the area heard the news a day later and drew the obvious conclusion; no one was happy when their commander, William Halsey, announced that strikes would continue as long as Japan held out. Two more men died before the Aug. 15 mission. Japan officially surrendered two hours after it left, and it was called back. During the return, 20 Japanese fighters attacked suddenly, shooting down four American planes before being driven off. Inevitably, this cast a pall over the carrier’s victory celebrations. The survivors and the men’s families never forgave Halsey, but the incident faded from history until Wukovits, author of a Halsey biography, discovered enough material about two of the fliers to tell their stories.
An expertly researched addition to the military history/biography genre.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-306-92205-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
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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