Historically accurate and well-researched: a welcome antidote to Hollywood’s airbrushed WWII romances. (16-page photo insert)
A history of the construction, staffing, shipboard life, and shocking destruction at Pearl Harbor of the USS Arizona, coupled with an earnest meditation on its legacy in American history.
Journalist Jasper (Lighthouses of the Delaware Bay and River, not reviewed), historian Delgado (Lost Warships: An Archaeological Tour of War at Sea, not reviewed), and shipwreck preservationist Adams share the distinction of being among a select group of people the US government has allowed to visit the underwater wreckage of the Arizona. This rare honor gives the writers a unique perspective on the battleship’s place in American history and helps them to effectively bring it to life. Their detailed reconstruction of the vibrant shipboard culture, using sailors’ descriptions of naval preparations for the looming war against Japan, adds poignancy to their two-chapter description of the Arizona’s death-throes, as those same sailors serve as eyewitnesses to the Japanese bombing that ignited the battleship’s ammunition magazines. Many of the survivors, some horribly burned or otherwise wounded, went on to fight the Japanese into submission at Midway and in other important naval battles. Just as the ship itself now exists as an underwater national monument, the authors treat the sailors who served on the Arizona as living testaments to the need for continual national vigilance against criminal aggressors. Their reconsideration of this lesson stands as a thoughtful and passionate addition to the tragic legacy of Pearl Harbor.
Historically accurate and well-researched: a welcome antidote to Hollywood’s airbrushed WWII romances. (16-page photo insert)Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-28690-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2001
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
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