A welcome addition to the military history of Vietnam.
Taut, well-written account of an unknown chapter in the Vietnam War: the perilous work of forward aerial observers along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Many brave Air Force flyers populate the pages of this collaboration by U.S. News and World Report writer Newman and Misty pilot Shepperd (Misty pilots, whose name comes, improbably, from a Johnny Mathis song, flew 247 Vietnam combat missions), but few braver than Howard Keith Williams, the Top Gun who graduated from flying transport planes to jockeying fighters up and down the most dangerous skies in Vietnam. Recruited by Dick Rutan (who in 1986 completed a nonstop solo flight around the world in a plane called Voyager) to join the unit called Commando Sabre, Williams and his comrades performed the equivalent of a ground tracker’s cutting for sign, flying just above the treetops to look for telltale dust kicked up by tanks and trucks, for tire tracks that ended abruptly (indicating a transport park) and for people and vehicles moving supplies from North to South Vietnam. The Misty pilots were the secret eyes and ears of the war, though they had to deal with generally unhelpful brass (of one superior officer, a Misty pilot protested, “The guy doesn’t give a shit about our war up north”) and had as well to contend with a crippling lack of coordination with other intelligence agencies, especially the CIA. Still, the Misty pilots provided invaluable information to American ground forces on enemy movements, suffering terrible losses in the bargain; some pilots ended up in the Hanoi Hilton, while others—including Williams, who had come in the meanwhile to regard the war as a “farce”—were killed in action. Indeed, Williams’s remains would not be recovered for 25 years, though they were not buried upside down—“So the world can kiss our ass,” as the pilots’ bawdy theme song put it.
A welcome addition to the military history of Vietnam.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46537-7
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Presidio/Random
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2005
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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