A harrowingly effective overview of the 76-hour clash that pitted US naval forces against entrenched Japanese defenders in the blood-drenched battle for a tiny Central Pacific atoll known as Tarawa (capital of the Gilbert Islands) during WW II. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources (including material previously unavailable in English), Alexander provides a detailed account of the late 1943 campaign in which the Allies seized the Gilberts in their island-hopping march on Tokyo. The author, a retired Marine Corps colonel, also puts the significance of the brutal engagement in clear perspective. To begin with, Tarawa had strategic import as a perimeter outpost for Japan's home islands. In American hands, for example, the military airfields there permitted aerial reconnaissance and raids in the Marshalls. The conquest also represented the first test of amphibious assault doctrine against a strongly fortified, fanatically defended objective. The big picture scarcely mattered to the US marines and the rikusentai who fought them to a costly draw during the first day of the offensive. With the issue very much in doubt and casualties mounting on both sides, Alexander observes, it was the resolve and staying power of individual officers and enlisted men that tipped the balance in favor of the invaders from the sea. Even so, over 1,000 marines and sailors lost their lives; almost 2,400 more were wounded. All but a handful of the nearly 5,000 Japanese combatants (whose redoubts withstood what was believed to be a devastating naval bombardment) were slain or died by their own hand. All told, US troops were awarded four Congressional Medals of Honor (three posthumously); the author provides vivid briefings on what it took to win them and the godforsaken atoll called Tarawa. A masterful report on a turning-point encounter in the context of a global conflict. (42 photos, 19 maps) (Military Book Club main selection)
Pub Date: Sept. 30, 1995
ISBN: 1-55750-031-2
Page Count: 293
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
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 2025 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.
