A worthy sortie that explores a curtain-closing moment in history that might have gone very badly indeed.
The surrender that almost wasn’t: an illuminating study of the last moments of World War II.
According to conventional histories, Japan lost no time in surrendering to the Allies after the atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In fact, writes Military History editor in chief Harding (The Last Battle: When U.S. and German Soldiers Joined Forces in the Waning Hours of World War II in Europe, 2013), who seems to be making a specialty of the forgotten closing episodes of WWII, there was more than sporadic resistance. Despite Emperor Hirohito’s order for a cease-fire, numerous military units committed mutiny by continuing to fight—and it was one such unit that killed American Airman Anthony Marchione, just 20 years old. In a neat blend of military and technological history, Harding links Marchione’s story to the development of the aircraft he staffed, a lumbering target called the Consolidated Dominator, a “trouble-plagued super bomber” that barely took off before being scrapped—and whose very existence has been reduced, these days, to a few parts in private collections around the world. Harding also examines the episode surrounding Marchione’s death in its global-implications context: had Gen. Douglas MacArthur chosen to retaliate, he suggests, the war in Japan might have raged on, since the anti-surrender elements in the Japanese military could have argued that the Allies, too, had violated the cease-fire agreement. There are some dense technical passages that will please aircraft enthusiasts but that civilians might find daunting (“The design featured a shoulder-mounted high-lift/low-drag Davis wing with a span of 135 feet, twin end-plate fin and rudder assemblies, and eighty-three-foot-long cylindrical fuselage, tricycle landing gear, and dual ‘roll-up’ bomb bays”) and a few moments of semidigested, tangential information (“Italy in the early twentieth century was a land of widespread economic inequality”), but in the main, the narrative is well-executed.
A worthy sortie that explores a curtain-closing moment in history that might have gone very badly indeed.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-306-82338-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
HISTORY | MODERN | 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
© Copyright 2024 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
