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LUCKY LADY

THE WORLD WAR II HEROICS OF THE USS SANTA FE AND THE FRANKLIN

For veterans and their kin, perhaps, though general readers would do better to turn to Doug Stanton’s In Harm’s Way (2001)...

An overlong, undercooked tale of hara-kiri and heroism on the high seas.

In the last days of WWII, the Japanese naval command targeted the US aircraft carrier Franklin for destruction at whatever cost, although the planners of that attack surely must have known that the attempt would not stem their defeat. On March 19, 1945, a Japanese bomber eluded American air cover and crashed through the carrier’s flight deck, setting the ship’s stores of fuel and ammunition afire. While swarms of kamikaze planes assembled to finish off the stricken carrier, the captain of the light cruiser Santa Fe—on which Denver-based writer Jackson’s father served—steered his ship alongside the badly listing Franklin, tied on lines, and began the perilous task of rescuing hundreds of surviving sailors while its firefighters joined those aboard the Franklin to extinguish the blaze. The Franklin survived, though some of its evacuees would be treated as pariahs for leaving the ship when no order to abandon it had been issued. Jackson covers the dramatic incident and its aftermath well, though he has a tendency to write in a tired war-correspondentese: “Everywhere he looked there were heroes. And maybe more importantly, everywhere he looked there were guys just doing what needed to be done.” “Still, there was nothing to do but roll with the punches and hit back.” “I’m writing the old lady today, ‘Drop them skivvies, honey, I’m coming home.’ ” Jackson devotes much space to portraits of the ordinary (very ordinary) joes who manned the ship—the farmboy from Missouri, the wisecracking big-city boy, the hot-dog pilot, “dark-haired and rakishly handsome, a cigarette dangling from his lips almost constantly.” These portraits never extend beyond the expected and add up to a second-tier Ambrosian celebration of heroism under fire—a bravery that is genuine and does not beg assertion after assertion.

For veterans and their kin, perhaps, though general readers would do better to turn to Doug Stanton’s In Harm’s Way (2001) for a satisfying ration of WWII naval combat.

Pub Date: April 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-7867-1061-6

Page Count: 528

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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