An earnest, comprehensive account of British and American animal service in wartime.
Hutton (Sgt. Reckless, 2014) collects the true tales of World War II’s gallant animal participants in this nonfiction work.
World War II produced heroes of all stripes, but as Hutton shows in this zoological volume, not all of them were human. The best-known animal soldiers were war dogs, drawn straight from the homes and farms of the American heartland: “Dogs for Defense recruited America’s first canine army, known affectionately as the K-9 Corps. Radio announcements and newspaper articles nationwide made the extraordinary pitch for people to donate their personal pets to the war effort.” These dogs served in all branches of the military as sentries, scouts, messengers, and even medics, quickly locating wounded soldiers on the battlefield. Hutton recounts stories about Chips—“the most highly decorated dog in U.S. military history”—a collie-shepherd-huskie mix who helped guard FDR and Churchill at Casablanca and later disabled a machine gun nest in Sicily. She includes tales of British dogs as well, like Bing, an Alsatian-collie mix that dropped into Normandy with the 13th Parachute Battalion on D-Day. While most of the animals covered in the book are dogs, there are also a number of pigeons, who served as messengers and spies and had wonderful names like Burma Queen, Lady Astor, and Wisconsin Boy. Horses were also used (primarily by the Coast Guard on America’s beaches), and mules served as pack animals in the war’s various theaters. Hutton even tells the story of a Royal Navy tomcat known as “Able Seaman” Simon who served with distinction during the postwar “Yangtze Incident” in China. Hutton’s prose is light and warm, just as one would expect in such a pet-centered book: “As a puppy, Peter—a beautiful Scotch collie born in 1941— was purchased for twenty-five shillings by Mrs. Audrey Stables of Birmingham, England. His path to glory was a surprising one.” This is a work meant for animal lovers, particularly those animal lovers who happen also to be WWII buffs. Younger readers may also enjoy these stories, which thankfully keep descriptions of death and violence to a minimum.
An earnest, comprehensive account of British and American animal service in wartime.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62157-658-7
Page Count: 466
Publisher: Regnery History
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
HISTORY | NATURE | MILITARY | GENERAL HISTORY
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 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.
