Action-packed descriptions of modern air combat combined with detailed tactical analysis: an intriguing account for general...
Former Air Force officer Wilcox (Wings of Fury, 1997, etc.) depicts the aerial teamwork and harrowing exploits of the Navy’s Black Aces squadron during the 1999 air war over Kosovo.
Fighter pilots in modern warfare need tactical savvy as well as bravery, the author reminds us in this insider’s account. Interviewing pilots aboard the aircraft carrier USS Roosevelt as the Kosovo conflict was winding down, he learned that many of the Navy’s young pilots began their tour without the type of combat experience necessary to face the sophisticated armaments of an ex-Soviet bloc country. According to Wilcox, this lack of experience confronted the Black Aces with two initial problems: young pilots failed to use their equipment properly in the heat of battle, and naval planners had no effective plan for engaging Serbian ground combat forces. His interviews clearly chronicle how the pilots quickly developed techniques for dodging surface-to-air missiles while simultaneously raining smart bombs upon strategic Serbian command posts. The narrative also captures the naval officers’ innovative solution for acquiring timely intelligence about well-camouflaged and highly mobile ground forces: right before an air strike, they sent out dangerous low-altitude missions with state-of-the-art imaging systems. As interesting as the author makes the Kosovo air campaign’s history sound, he grips the reader most with his portrayal of the close-knit community of fighter pilots. By the time Wilcox describes the Black Aces’ successful decimation of enemy armored columns at the campaign’s end, he has transformed the aviators from Top Gun clones into brave individuals overcoming tremendous challenges.
Action-packed descriptions of modern air combat combined with detailed tactical analysis: an intriguing account for general readers as well as valuable for military specialists.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-26916-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2002
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2023 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
