A compelling glimpse into forgotten World War II history.
Four survivors of a World War II Japanese prison camp are the subjects of this gripping story.
Colton (Counting Coup: A Story of Basketball and Honor on the Little Big Horn, 2000) picks up his subjects at a young age. While they came from different parts of the country and different backgrounds, they had in common impoverished childhoods and were hit hard as the Depression took its toll on their families. Chuck Vervalin, from upstate New York, dreamed of becoming a harness race driver; Bob Palmer, from Oregon, joined the Navy when his girlfriend dropped him after she entered college; Texan Tim McCoy figured the Navy would be easier than the four jobs he was working to support his mother; Canadian-born Gordy Cox, growing up in Washington State, dropped out of school because the work was too hard. All ended up on the U.S.S. Grenadier, a submarine patrolling off Malaya early in the war. Bombed by a Japanese plane, its captain and crew were taken prisoner in April 1943. From then until the end of the war, more than two years later, they were imprisoned, beaten, tortured, starved and forced to work in Japanese factories. Colton tells their stories in unflinching detail, looking at their different survival stragegies. McCoy played the tough guy, even taking on one of the guards in a wrestling match; Cox tried to fade into invisibility. Liberated after the Japanese surrender, they returned to their lives in the United States, looking for a new, normal life. The author follows them for a short time, then jumps to the present day, wrapping up their stories in a final epilogue chapter for each man. All showed signs of what in more recent veterans would have been diagnosed as PTSD, though they would have rejected that term. All had marital troubles, and all were at one point heavily dependent on alcohol. But each of them made it into their 80s with full mental acuity, and Colton has given them a fine last chance to tell their stories.
A compelling glimpse into forgotten World War II history.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-609-61043-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2010
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
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
