A fresh contribution to women’s history.
A military historian examines women’s volunteer efforts to support American troops.
An adviser to a PBS documentary on the United Service Organizations, Vuic (War, Conflict, and Society/Texas Christian Univ.; The Routledge History of Gender, War, and the U.S. Military, 2017, etc.) draws on extensive archival sources to create a thoroughly documented, anecdote-filled history of women’s roles as recreation program volunteers from World War I to the present. Besides illuminating women’s significance in military life, the author chronicles changes in assumptions about gender, sexuality, and race in American culture for the last 100 years. Under the auspices of the Red Cross, the USO, and the military’s Special Services, young women worked on bases and battlefields “to distract lonely men from war’s boredom and brutality,” serving as “representations of ideal femininity and womanhood, and as reminders of the civilian and domestic life to which the men would return.” Preferred volunteers were college-educated, attractive, vivacious, and independent, eager for the adventure of an overseas assignment. Above all, they needed “to embody a particular kind of middle-American wholesomeness” that would contrast favorably with scantily clad USO performers and “exotic, sexualized native women” such as prostitutes, who thronged around military bases. Volunteers cooked, handed out doughnuts, and danced with servicemen; however, they were warned, romance and sex were not in their job description. During the Vietnam War, the Red Cross rotated women often during their tour to keep them from becoming too close to soldiers. Some volunteers chafed at restrictions, which included living behind barbed-wire fences, obeying curfews, and never leaving camp alone. In 1973, the transition from conscription to the All-Volunteer Force meant that more families accompanied servicemen and servicewomen, changing the volunteers’ role from being “wholesome symbols of desire” to offering programs such as community centers and summer day camp. Still, even with increasing numbers of servicewomen, officials continued to sanction “hypersexualized entertainment,” evidence of the “conflicting, yet intertwined ways” that women have been used by the military.
A fresh contribution to women’s history.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-674-98638-1
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
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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