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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.
A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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