A fine biography of an admirable man.
Fighting “the enemies lurking within—ignorance, boredom, fear, hopelessness”—with books.
Historian Manning, author of When Books Went to War (2014), which recounted a program that supplied books to American soldiers during World War II, writes a lively biography of the man behind it. Ray Trautman (1907-82), a poor farm boy, joined the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a New Deal program that paid young men to work in park conservation. He was assigned to teach literacy and assemble libraries, work so enjoyable that he returned to college for a degree in library science. In 1940, eligible for the draft and aware that the Army was reviving its library division, he applied and was placed in charge. Most of a soldier’s time is spent waiting around, and fighting boredom is an obsession. “In the oppressive heat and humidity of the South Pacific,” Manning writes, Trautman spoke of how “he had witnessed troops passing along soiled, grimy books because it was all they had to read. Though damp, dog-eared, and dilapidated, they handled them as delicately as ancient artifacts, for there was no knowing if more would arrive.” The traditional army solution—book drives—invariably flopped. Most contributions were on subjects of no interest to young men or hardbound, which few soldiers wanted to carry into the field. Trautman went to work. Most publishers weren’t keen on paperbacks, a new phenomenon, but Trautman, now a powerful figure, persuaded them to reconsider. He devised the Armed Services Editions, specially printed, wallet-sized paperbacks that fit into a uniform pocket. After some arm-twisting, magazines produced shrunken, advertising-free editions. By 1947, 143 million were distributed, along with half a billion books and a generous supply of comic books. Trautman and publishers successfully fended off inevitable private censorship efforts, but Congress was his “most formidable foe” in determining which books soldiers would get. Discharged in 1945, he continued to spread his love of books: advocating rural libraries, libraries in prisons, reading for the visually impaired and those with poor literacy.
A fine biography of an admirable man.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2026
ISBN: 9780197861240
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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