Full of fascinating material but fails to gel as a whole.
Among the lesser-known effects of the Vietnam War was the desertion of a large number of American servicemen, many of whom made their way to Sweden.
Newsweek International contributing editor Sweet (West End Front: The Wartime Secrets of London's Grand Hotels, 2011, etc.) begins with the defections of several men in 1968. In Japan, Mark Shapiro left his hotel and went to a safe house run by a Japanese anti-war group that put him on a Russian ship, eventually ending up in Stockholm. Shapiro quickly became a leader in the deserter community. Like the others Sweet interviewed nearly 50 years afterward, Shapiro is cagey about what he wants to tell about those days. The broad story is fairly clear, though. The deserters included anti-war idealists along with a fair number who saw desertion as their best way to get out of an increasingly impossible situation in Vietnam. The author does his best to record the different factions involved, as well as the attitude of the Swedes. At first, they welcomed the Americans as principled opponents of a colonial war, but they gradually became disillusioned. There were also a number of outside forces seeking to capitalize on the deserters: the Soviet Union, the international anti-war movement, the U.S. government, and others who saw them as tokens in a larger game. Sweet puts the spotlight on Lyndon LaRouche, whose conspiracy theories took hold among the deserters, following several of them who became members of his cultlike following. The author presents a wealth of intriguing stories about a largely unknown segment of the 1960s counterculture. Unfortunately, the presentation is somewhat disjointed, as Sweet jumps among a variety of perspectives. Readers looking for a neat conclusion to the deserters’ story will likely be disappointed; the tale is ongoing, and the participants have gone in different directions. The shift from the anti-war story to the rise of the LaRouche cult, while implicit in the material, reads like an unannounced detour.
Full of fascinating material but fails to gel as a whole.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62779-463-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
HISTORY | MILITARY | UNITED STATES | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2026 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.
