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 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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