This sketchy account attempts to tell the US Marines' version of the story of the Battle of Okinawa. The highly strategic island of Okinawa (only 375 miles from the home islands of Japan) was the locus of a cataclysmic bloodletting of young Americans, Japanese, and Okinawans that, oddly enough, is still little known by the public. Leckie (From Sea to Shining Sea, 1993, etc.) writes of an awesome force of 1,600 US ships carrying 545,000 GIs and Marines with 12,000 aircraft that hit the island on April 1, 1945. He claims this force, in terms of troops, firepower, and tonnage, was larger than the more famous D- Day landing in Normandy. The author relates main incidents of the four-month battle in brief sketches enlivened by anecdotes about GIs, marines, and sailors, and glimpses of Japanese generals planning impregnable networks of caves and tactics designed to repel the American invaders. The campaign brought fierce Army- Marine rivalry to a head as Marine General H.M. ``Howlin' Mad'' Smith relieved the more deliberate Army General Ralph Smith of his command of the 27th Army Division. Leckie, a Marine veteran of WW II, has disinterred a story of the supposed poor performance of the 27th, and contrasts the Army division with the glorious ``gung-ho'' tactics of the Marines. Professional historians have long repudiated this self-serving Marine account and have concluded that the 27th was almost always understrength because its casualties were proportionally the highest in the campaign; indeed, its assigned terrain was much more difficult than that assigned the Marines. Marine General Smith was later reprimanded by an official military body because of his unfair treatment of the 27th, but Leckie omits this fact. Leckie's flawed account hardly does justice to this climactic Pacific battle that warned Allied strategists that an invasion of Japan could cause a bloodbath many times worse. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-670-84716-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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