A vivid contribution to media and military history.
War correspondents confront military secrets, tests of loyalty, and constant danger.
Based on published dispatches, memoirs, and archival sources, Casey (International History/London School of Economics; When Soldiers Fall: How Americans Have Confronted Combat Losses from World War I to Afghanistan, 2014, etc.) closely examines the experiences of American journalists who reported from Germany, Italy, and North Africa from 1942 through Germany’s surrender in 1945. The author questions the argument, put forth by other historians, that journalists colluded with the military to disseminate a picture of triumph, airbrushing bloody battle scenes and self-censoring their work so as to bolster support for the war. Excessive media deference, some historians believe, “served to hide everything except the genius of generals and the success of their soldiers.” Casey convincingly argues that reporters were not tools of the military’s public relations offices, drawing on the work of star journalists such as Drew Middleton, Ernie Pyle, and photographer Robert Capa as well as reporters not as well remembered, whose dispatches appeared in daily newspapers and on radio. These men (and a few women) saw themselves as “courageous danger seekers whose rightful place was in the midst of the action,” but they responded in different ways to what they observed and how they conceived their responsibility to the public. All needed to negotiate with the military, which tried to control news stories, while recognizing reporters’ pressure to deliver daily updates. Reporters were circumscribed, also, by considerations other than military strategy: Casey notes “brazen editing” of any stories related to race, for example. White reporters either ignored black issues or “excised” them entirely, helping to obfuscate the military’s blatant segregation. Although the Air Force claimed it attacked only military targets, one intrepid reporter broke the news of the “terror bombing” of civilians, emboldening editors to pursue similar stories. Figures such as Eisenhower and Patton play roles in Casey’s illuminating narrative, but his focus is largely on reporters and their efforts, sometimes heroic, to get the best scoop.
A vivid contribution to media and military history.Pub Date: April 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-19-066062-8
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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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