A useful history of an important, fairly unknown part of the American contribution to the Allied victory.
A long-overdue, sympathetic treatment of the barrage balloon operators who fought valiantly on the beaches of France.
In her debut, journalist and photographer Hervieux unearths a valuable piece of the D-Day landing story scarcely included in the official records: the contributions of the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion, the only African-American combat unit to land at Normandy. (The 320th medics were heralded for their heroics in saving lives.) The balloons, whose cables and bomb cargo kept the enemy flying too high to strafe the vulnerable coasts, were a novelty but a proven deterrent to the German aircraft. They had evolved from the time of Napoleon through the American Civil War and World War I. Since the armed barrage balloons were maneuvered by cables from the ground, they required highly skilled operators. Though not a military specialist, Hervieux became entranced by the stories of these “forgotten” heroes, several of whom she was able to track down in the last few years. She methodically follows the training of the young Southern black recruits such as Henry Parham and Wilson Monk, among others, at Camp Tyson, Tennessee, from late 1942 onward, where discrimination against black soldiers was staggering. Considered by the then-segregated military as “too dumb to fight,” African-Americans soldier knew they were proving themselves mightily in this unusual mission of diverting bombers from important sites in Britain. Shipped out of New York harbor in November 1943 to Britain during the preparation for D-Day, the 320th was delighted to be welcomed by the fairly unbiased Britons, who offered them a taste of freedom for the first time. The battalion landed on the Normandy beaches after the initial waves of casualties, establishing 20 balloons over Omaha and 13 over Utah on June 7 and incurring fierce enemy fire. Eventually, as many as 143 balloons floated 2,000 feet over the beaches, offering crucial protection to the precariously installed Allied troops.
A useful history of an important, fairly unknown part of the American contribution to the Allied victory.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-231379-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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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