It took years of tireless research on the part of an Army investigator to bring this appalling story to even the barest...
Journalists Sallah and Weiss expand their Pulitzer Prize–winning account of American atrocities in Vietnam to book length.
Tiger Force was a Special Forces–like unit made up of men who had already passed tough paratrooper training. Founded by David Hackworth—reputedly the model for Marlon Brando’s character in Apocalypse Now—the unit was intended to “outguerrilla the guerrillas,” scrapping the techniques of conventional warfare to take the fight to the enemy in the jungle. Along the way, it also scrapped the rules of war; as Sallah and Weiss show, every soldier received written instructions over what was and was not allowed but just as quickly threw them away. Unlike Special Forces, Tiger Force was made up of a mixed lot, elite only in the fighting sense. Many had done jail time, and many Tiger Force veterans died young, of cancer or cirrhosis or suicide; one of the most violently inclined, an Apache Indian always close at hand at the book’s darkest moments, died at 34. But commanders set the tone, and Tiger Force’s leaders were close to psychopathic in their hatred for Vietnamese people, no matter what side they were supposed to be on: The most damning passages point to a breakdown of discipline and dangerous, murderous incompetence at the top. In that climate, many of Tiger Force’s soldiers took to killing indiscriminately while trying desperately to “minimize the emotions associated with the events”—and thereby justifying their actions, even as some of the soldiers tried to steer their comrades back on course. Said one, “The valley was a shitty place for all of us. But we didn’t have to pick on civilians. We were the Tigers. We were above that.”
It took years of tireless research on the part of an Army investigator to bring this appalling story to even the barest glimmer of light. Sallah and Weiss do a solid job of unearthing the rest of it.Pub Date: May 15, 2006
ISBN: 0-316-15997-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
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 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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