A gripping story for readers in search of either drama or historical edification.
An account of one pilot’s experience in World War II that’s part biography and part world history.
Debut author Snyder became an amateur historian following his retirement, inspired by his father Howard’s participation in World War II as the captain and pilot of a B-17 Flying Fortress bomber. Partly based on Howard Snyder’s diaries, this book also includes interviews with his crewmates, weaving a cohesive quilt of perspectives. The story begins with and centers on Howard’s life, starting with his upbringing in Nebraska, and taking readers on a tour of his marriage to Ruth, his enlistment, his time in pilot school, and then a series of dangerous combat missions over German-occupied Europe. However, the book is just as much about the war itself, and its grand historical moment in time, as it is about Howard’s life. The author discusses the horror and consequences of Pearl Harbor, the devastation and tactical importance of D-day, and the Casablanca Conference, for example; he also describes the lives of the soldiers themselves, such as how popular they were with English women and how they used recreation to distract themselves from the danger at hand: “Regardless, most men were able to keep a relatively detached attitude, centered on self-survival and the common belief that it only happened to someone else.” Even the dramatic culmination of the book, when Howard’s plane is shot down over Belgium, is equally concerned with depicting Belgium as it is Howard’s plight. This is a stark, welcome contrast to the current fashion among literary renderings of war, which prefer to focus solipsistically on characters’ interior lives. More than a third of the book is devoted to Howard’s attempt to evade German forces after being shot down, when he was dependent on the good graces of Belgium resistance forces. The author does an impressive job letting the tale speak for itself, giving center stage to the words of the soldiers and eschewing unnecessary dramatic embellishment. Although it breaks no new historical ground, Snyder’s contribution is an excellent one that honors both the personal and global effects of war.
A gripping story for readers in search of either drama or historical edification.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9860760-0-8
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Sea Breeze Publishing LLC
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2015
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 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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