A sharp, exciting account, sure to appeal to military history buffs but also instructive for those who think that stories of...
Retired Air Force pilot and military historian Wetterhahn offers the fullest account yet of the Mayaguez incident, that series of events often symbolically thought of as the last battle of the Vietnam War.
On May 12, 1975, a little more than two years after the last US ground forces left Vietnam, Khmer Rouge, assigned to the islands south of Cambodia, seized the Mayaguez, a US merchant ship bound for Thailand. The crew of 40 were taken to the mainland, but not before the radio operator got off his SOS. In a few hours, situation reports began to reach the National Security Council, ably portrayed by Wetterhahn from declassified minutes of the meetings between President Ford, Secretary of State Kissinger, and Defense Secretary Schlesinger, among others. Ford was determined to punish the Cambodians and to effect a dramatic rescue, and insisted on controlling the combat situation from the Oval Office, resulting in a confused battle plan that sent a company of Marines into an assault on a stoutly-defended island where the captives were erroneously thought to be. After 41 Marines and Air Force personnel died in ground combat or helicopter crashes, the Cambodians released the merchant seaman. In the meantime, the Navy had captured the Mayaguez without resistance. Most heartbreaking of all, the Marines left behind three men, who were captured, bludgeoned to death, and buried in shallow graves. They were, in a way, the last Americans to die in the Vietnam War, and their heroism has yet to be acknowledged.
A sharp, exciting account, sure to appeal to military history buffs but also instructive for those who think that stories of lost POWs and MIAs are crackpot legends for zealots. The truth, which Wetterhahn patiently and evenhandedly pursues, hurts.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7867-0858-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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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