Maslowski (History/University of Nebraska at Lincoln) breaks fresh ground with a comprehensive history of WW II's anonymous heroes: its combat photographers. It may be that neither the brilliant general nor the loyal foot soldier was more crucial to America's WW II effort than the lowly combat photographer, who allowed civilians to witness what no one but soldiers had ever seen, and whose work proved invaluable to both generals and military analysts. The obstacles faced by these soldier/photographers were daunting: the weight of a motion-picture camera and film supply could stagger a man or a mule, and the official still camera was a Speed Graphic, so big and shiny that to pop it up from a foxhole invariably drew a hail of enemy bullets. The superior, lightweight German Leica camera was reverse- engineered by American labs but reached the front only in 1945; by then, however, American combat photographers had their own Leicas- -bought from looters. To assure the credibility of their film documentaries, the armed services had a strict policy of no ``reenactments''—but the trouble was, as one Omaha Beach veteran who later became a Hollywood director pointed out, the real thing didn't look as good as the movies: ``To do it right you'd have to blind the audience with smoke, deafen them with noise, then shoot one of them in the shoulder to scare the rest to death.'' The first great combat-movie breakthrough was John Huston's San Pietro, which documented the liberation of an Italian town. It was released to great acclaim (Time magazine declared that Huston's handiwork was ``as good a war film as any that has been made...remarkable in its honesty and excellence''), but in a fascinating display of historical sleuthing, Maslowski shows that many scenes in San Pietro were staged—including reenacted dialogue and ``dead Germans'' that were actually live GIs dressed in enemy uniforms. Virtuoso scholarship, formidably researched and exciting to read.
Pub Date: Nov. 11, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-920265-5
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1993
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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