Wood is no Studs Terkel, and her book is less a structured oral history than a collection of anecdotes. Still, her subjects...
If there were ever the opposite of a “good war,” in the Studs Terkelian sense, Iraq is it. So the veterans interviewed by journalist Wood tell us.
Though early on she quotes the observation of war correspondent Evan Wright—who has actually been on the ground in Iraq—that the present generation of GIs is a cynical one that believes that “the Big Lie is as central to American governance as taxation,” Wood does not completely prepare the reader for the bitterness and despair that many of her subjects report. One soldier, believing that Iraqi civilians knew of an ambush against his unit—“People fucking knew”—recalls shooting a woman who was cowering behind a tree, apparently just to vent his anger. Other soldiers, incensed by suicide bombs, thirst for payback; all it takes is one explosion to turn soldiers who were “young and innocent and just new cherries” into grim avengers. Wood’s subjects report from all areas of the battle, though for whatever reason, many of them saw duty in “mortuary affairs” units. Though sometimes their accounts are lighthearted, as when Marines compete to use items from a word-of-the-day calendar “in a sentence to the highest-ranking officer [they] could get to,” most are somber tales of friends lost and innocents dead, full of searching questions about the meaning of it all. Several voice the view that the U.S. is in Iraq for the oil, and that the Iraqi insurgence is completely understandable: “If I was held oppressed by the white infidel invader,” says one soldier, “I would be out on the street with every one of them.” Says another, “Five good American kids just died. What the fuck was this for? I hope Bush is happy.”
Wood is no Studs Terkel, and her book is less a structured oral history than a collection of anecdotes. Still, her subjects offer important testimony on a bad scene that promises only to get worse.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-316-01670-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2006
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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