Fantastic, authentic military fiction.
Taut, well-crafted thriller about a nuclear stand-off in the waning days of the Nixon administration.
McCurdy’s book offers a microscopic view of the officers stationed at the Minuteman Missile System located at Missouri’s Whiteman Air Force Base during the 1970s. Based on actual events, McCurdy examines an aborted missile launch through the perspective of Lieutenant Gray Crawford, a crack Air Force officer stationed at the base. Crawford is a hero’s hero, a military wunderkind best suited to performing under duress. Readers will likely become captivated by Crawford–both as a man and a soldier–as he carefully ponders the fateful decision that, in the tensest days of the Cold War, will head off World War III. McCurdy was once stationed as a commander at Whiteman during the early ’70s and channels his experiences into the book, lending the story a level of detail and authenticity missing from other, more dilettantish military fictions. Access to recently declassified information flavors the narrative with a certain cache; the author’s claim that some of the stories have been, until recently, top secret only ratchets up the level of excitement. But McCurdy keeps the novel’s pace exhilarating with energetic prose and imaginative renderings. He turns the Launch Control Capsule (the underground command center where the Missile System team works) into a pressure cooker where anything can happen–a sort of militaristic soap-opera set. But Whiteman is not jingoist military fiction. McCurdy may pack his book with thrills, but he is also sure to communicate the heavy ethical burdens carried by the men who, day in and day out, have their fingers on the proverbial red button. This depth of characterization provides the book with a nuanced weight and texture that assures McCurdy’s novel serious consideration.
Fantastic, authentic military fiction.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2008
ISBN: 978-0976117919
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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