A dialogue-heavy, techno-talk-filled war memoir by a former Marine lieutenant who led reconnaissance missions in Vietnam in 1970. Hodgins joined the US Marine Corps in 1964. After five years as an enlisted man, he became an officer in 1969, at the height of the American war in Vietnam. Later that year, Hodgins went to Vietnam, where he served as an infantry platoon leader. He then passed up a safe job in the rear and volunteered to become a reconnaissance platoon leader in northern Vietnam. Hodgins's book concentrates on the three-plus months he spent leading dangerous, tension-filled patrols behind enemy lines—a story he tells as if it happened yesterday. The narrative is filled with minute-by- minute reconstructions of what the author experienced, from the mundane to the extraordinary. Possessing something akin to total recall of events that took place 26 years ago, Hodgins spells out in great detail the meals he ate, the beverages he consumed, the conversations he had with his fellow officers and the enlisted men who served under him, the types of weapons he and his men carried, and the weather and terrain conditions they encountered—among myriad other details. Hodgins ``freshened'' his memory of those long-ago events, he says, by studying official Marine Corps documents, ``historical publications,'' letters and diaries written by his former comrades, and ``by personal interviews with some of those men.'' The result is a decently written wartime journal that in some parts reads like a novel. Hodgins tells his tale chronologically, sticking to facts and offering little reflection on the sometimes momentous events he took part in. This is occasionally jarring, as in the case where he describes shooting a wounded, unarmed enemy soldier. For Marine Corps action aficionados only. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-449-91059-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1996
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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