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 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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