For hard-core fans only, a dull memoir of a few months in Elvis Presley's two-year military career. Taylor, a retired army colonel and military analyst, was a 25- year-old first lieutenant stationed with the 32nd Tank Battalion in West Germany when 23-year-old Private Presley arrived in 1958. (Elvis was assigned to a scout platoon that the author had previously commanded and in which he took a special interest, Elvis aside.) Taylor's anecdotal book shows Elvis as an excellent soldier and a respectful, sensitive, regular guy: Elvis does more push-ups than anybody in his platoon; Elvis shoots well with a .45; Elvis finds it significant that Taylor's middle name is Jesse, which was the middle name of Elvis's stillborn twin; Elvis charms Taylor's wife and children; Elvis charms German girls; Elvis and Taylor play touch football. But although these stories show Elvis approximately at ease, the author readily admits that they were not buddies: Elvis was an enlisted man, Taylor an officer, and professional distance was maintained. Much of the book concerns military procedures that will hold little interest for even staunch devotees of Elvis trivia. For instance, Taylor gives a blow-by-blow account of a training operation in which he and Elvis infiltrated an ``enemy'' camp, but he reports with equal gusto maneuvers that Elvis had nothing to do with. Taylor wasn't a rock 'n' roll fan, and he communicates a vague bemusement about Elvis's celebrity. An unarresting brush-with-stardom memoir that contributes an average-Joe alternative to the familiar Elvis clichÇs. (photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Aug. 16, 1995
ISBN: 0-89141-558-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Presidio/Random
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 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 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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