Intimate and memorable portraits of these idealistic, daredevil young men are contained in a marvelously fluid narrative.
A deeply empathetic account of the first gentlemen pilots feeling their ways in uncharted territory.
A World War II pilot who caught the fever of flying as a youth, accomplished literary scholar Hynes (Emeritus, Literature/Princeton Univ.; Flights of Passage: Recollections of a World War II Aviator, 2005, etc.) sifts through the letters and diaries of young American men who were eager to enlist in the European war effort as an opportunity or an ideal. Well before the United States entered the war in April 1917, seven Americans had trained with the French in what became the Lafayette Escadrille as early as 1914. Mainly from well-to-do families and Ivy League–educated, they approached flying as a dangerous sport, much like sailing or polo. (Some notable exceptions: Bert Hall, a Paris taxi driver and drifter, and the legendary Eddie Rickenbacker, a somewhat older, non–college educated race car driver who only garners peripheral attention here.) Hynes moves gradually through the paces these early pilots had to learn, since aviation was in its infancy and the U.S. was “ill-equipped, ill-trained and undermanned” and had no air service to speak of until Hiram Bingham, professor of South American history at Yale and a pilot, was appointed in 1917 to plan a training program and mold the ideal pilot candidate. Besides learning literally from the ground up by piloting Blériot XI aircraft around the French flight fields and mastering the skills of aerobatics (looping), formation, vol de combat and gunnery, the novice pilots had to navigate the perils of being abroad for the first time: namely, wine, women and Paris. Tight friendships and sudden, inexplicable deaths brought home sobering truths.
Intimate and memorable portraits of these idealistic, daredevil young men are contained in a marvelously fluid narrative.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-374-27800-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
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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