Casual and scholarly interests alike will find this book useful as a desk reference or a non-continuous read.
Korea was just a country after that conflict, but Vietnam is still a war 40 years later—that is the assertion and question of Radford University professor Brown in her encyclopedic dictionary comprising various concepts and terminology of the conflict.
The A-to-Z coverage includes entries of military hardware, lingo, culture, politics, personalities and geography. The sum of over 500 items “chronicles the 60s culture and the hostile environment of Vietnam and how that affected the United States Infantry,” the author writes. This perspective includes numerous quotes from vets and the wives they left behind, reporters covering the war, USO workers, politicians and medical personnel. The entire volume is assembled from the perspective of those who were there or affected, but the entries are sometimes wide ranging and varying. Some terms are merely defined in one line, such as “Bagged and Tagged. Processing a dead body at Graves Registration.” Other terms are defined the same way, but then followed by detail and quotes, like the entries for “Immersion Foot,” “Hanoi Hilton,” “Donut Dolly” and “Slicks.” There are also terms that are so general that they are appropriately not defined, but rather discussed in context, such as “Courage,” “Monsoon” and “Boot Camp.” There are few entries dedicated to people and place, since the focus is on the participants and their language. Brown has spent of a lot of time with Vietnam vets in her classroom and elsewhere. She notes that many have yet to share their story with loved ones, so her format and acknowledgments are a concerted effort to give voice to those who experienced an event. Quotes and material are attentively cited in the text. Historians and military buffs will certainly recognize sources such as Michael Herr and James Dunnigan; however, the approximately 200 works consulted represents scholarly endeavor, including the author’s hours of conversation and correspondence with vets. The dictionary format, several insightful appendices and personal voices converge to create a somewhat unique offering.
Casual and scholarly interests alike will find this book useful as a desk reference or a non-continuous read.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2011
ISBN: 978-1462885367
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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