A visually spectacular collection of photography sure to inspire the patriotic.
Sherman leads an international photographic tour of the cemeteries in which American soldiers from two world wars are buried.
The Battle Monuments Commission maintains 23 cemeteries outside the United States in eight countries across three continents memorializing more than 200,000 American soldiers who died in World War I and World War II. Over the course of more than five years, the author visited all of them on a “journey of personal gratitude”; here, he presents a photographic record of his experience. His goal is not to produce another history book that dryly recites facts—Sherman is aiming for a more poignant homage to the soldiers who served bravely and never made it home. (“For military families and friends who lose a loved one, the loss is never ‘history’ to them.”) In addition to beautiful color photographs of the cemeteries, the author also produces a few dozen brief profiles of some of the solders, which include photographs of them and their headstones. Some are immediately notable—like Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., oldest son of former U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt—while others are obscure but fascinating, like Alexis Sommaripa, a spy who was the was the only civilian tank commander in the U.S. Army. The biographical vignettes can be gripping and provide a remarkable vision of the great diversity of the soldiers who sacrificed their lives for their country, but the principal strength of the book is the author’s photography, which combines dramatic composition with stunningly vivid color. Sherman frets that the memory of the wars and their moral significance is “drifting into history for young people in America,” and his book is meant as a corrective to that creeping collective forgetfulness. It is likely too much to ask of any single volume to reverse such a trend, but this is unquestionably an arresting assemblage of photography that lovingly stirs admiration for the bravery of the nation’s fallen heroes.
A visually spectacular collection of photography sure to inspire the patriotic.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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