A worthy companion to Rick Atkinson’s outstanding In the Company of Soldiers (p. 115).
A frontline memoir by Daily Telegraph correspondent Poole, the sole UK journalist to be embedded with American forces in the Iraq campaign.
Being British bought Poole plenty of love, he recalls, and even if some of the troopers who served in the armored infantry unit called the Black Knights seemed to think his accent funny and his skills as a touch typist just short of magic, most appreciated the support that Tony Blair’s government was affording them. Says one tough sergeant, “It could feel lonely out in this desert if you Brits weren’t here with us.” The British soldiers he encounters during the invasion of Iraq take a different view, complaining that the fight is America’s and that British boys should not be dying in the desert to satisfy George Bush’s grudges. Many Americans Poole interviews agree—one tells him, “I have no beef with the Iraqis. This is Bush’s war. . . . It’s all for political reasons”—but most seem convinced not only of the righteousness of their cause, but also of the self-evident nature of the proposition that the world is America’s to rule. Whether pro or con, one surprise is to find that American grunts were comparing the war in Iraq to Vietnam the minute it started; Ted Kennedy is far from alone in making the analogy. One soldier worries—and this is in 2003—that the antiwar movement was rapidly growing: “What if this is like Vietnam,” he asks, “where we go back and they throw rocks at us?” Another, crossing into Iraq, says glumly, “I sure hope we haven’t just walked straight into a new Vietnam.” Such sentiments, it would seem, fly in the face of the brass’s efforts to uproot the “Vietnam syndrome,” but that news apparently hasn’t reached the dogfaces, ready to believe every rumor (that J.Lo. has been killed in a car wreck, that Jessica Lynch is being gang-raped by Republican Guards) and to kill everything that moves before them.
A worthy companion to Rick Atkinson’s outstanding In the Company of Soldiers (p. 115).Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-00-717438-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: HarperCollins UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2004
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
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