A welcome addition to the literature on the Vietnam War.
A detailed account of the last desperate days of the American presence in Vietnam.
Clarke (JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President, 2013, etc.) begins his harrowing narrative with Dutch photojournalist Hugh van Es’ famous photograph of people lined up on a stairway to the roof of 22 Gia Long St. in Saigon, being helped into a helicopter by a man in a white shirt and dark pants. While this shot has become “the last great photograph” of an ignoble war Americans “have spent decades trying to forget,” the author sees the gesture of the U.S. Embassy’s deputy air operations officer, O.B. Harnage, as he reaches out to help evacuating Vietnamese, as noble, even heroic. Indeed, many of the U.S. personnel at the bitter end of American occupation went to great personal and professional lengths, often illegally, to help the approximately 130,000 Vietnamese who made it out. On one hand, these Americans knew that anyone connected to the U.S. or to the administration of President Nguyen Van Thieu, which was bolstered by the U.S., would suffer serious reprisals when the Communists arrived. On the other hand, some officials, including Ambassador Graham Martin, believed that “any indication that the United States was preparing an evacuation would demoralize South Vietnam’s military.” Clarke methodically traces the “omens” that showed the writing on the wall of South Vietnam’s capitulation—e.g., the fall of Phuoc Binh, north of Saigon, in January 1975 or the American decision to halt the allocation of any more financial aid or military support. The Paris Peace Accords of January 1973, which had led to a cease-fire, had been unceremoniously violated by both sides, and America had had enough. In the end, despite persistent finger pointing, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger became insistent that the U.S. had a moral obligation to evacuate South Vietnamese allies. Moving to a hair-raising climax, Clarke meticulously sifts through hasty evacuation measures and relates the sad stories of those who did not make it out.
A welcome addition to the literature on the Vietnam War.Pub Date: April 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53964-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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