An enjoyable and briskly told group biography.
Valiant women at war.
Journalist Rogak, biographer of media personalities Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart, among others, uncovers the eventful history of four women recruited by America’s Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, to create and disseminate propaganda aimed at breaking the morale of Axis soldiers. They were 28-year-old Betty MacDonald, Czech-born Zuzka Lauwers, Navy wife Jane Smith-Hutton, and international film star Marlene Dietrich. Restless, feisty, and ambitious, each wanted to participate in the war effort, preferably overseas. Betty had worked as a reporter in Hawaii when her husband was stationed there; Jane, who spoke fluent Japanese, had been held captive in Tokyo for six months with her husband, a naval attaché; multilingual Zuzka had worked at the Czech embassy in Washington, D.C., before enlisting in the Army. Among the 21,640 employees of the OSS, they joined a department known as the Morale Operations branch, where they carried out tasks that often put them in mortal danger. Zuzka, for example, digging for military intelligence, interrogated German POWs “who could snuff out her life with one well-aimed finger to the throat.” Betty worked behind enemy lines in China, writing radio scripts to strike fear in Japanese soldiers; one of Jane’s projects was producing a phony field service code manual for Japanese soldiers designed to incite them to surrender. Marlene, who made USO tours and sang on clandestine radio broadcasts aimed at German civilians and soldiers, had a bounty on her head. But her need for revenge against the Nazis made her fearless. Rogak recounts the projects that energized them during the war, the sexism they faced within the largely male OSS (only 4,000 employees were women), and their profound feeling of letdown when the war—and the intense excitement of their jobs—ended.
An enjoyable and briskly told group biography.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781250275592
Page Count: 240
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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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