Strong prose and a lively atmosphere keep Siemon-Netto’s memoir from getting bogged down despite its scattered focus.
Being a wartime correspondent opens the door to heroism and heartbreak, as demonstrated in Siemon-Netto’s uneven but powerful memoir of his time covering the Vietnam War.
Already a seasoned reporter by the time he arrived in Vietnam in the 1960s, Siemon-Netto was well-positioned to watch a clash of cultures and governments not just on the front lines, but in the back country and city streets of a country he learned to love over the course of his five-year assignment. From counterinsurgent experts to street orphans living in his car, Siemon-Netto explored many facets of Vietnamese society and came to respect the tenacity and ingenuity of its people. In the course of his book, he both celebrates the Vietnam he knew and deplores what it became, saving particular scorn for the failure of will in the West—a “deficiency endemic in liberal democracies,” he says—that allowed North Vietnam to “win” the conflict. As would be expected from a longtime professional journalist, Siemon-Netto’s prose is clean and direct; it evokes the physical and cultural atmospheres of 1960s Vietnam without straining for effect. He introduces a large cast of characters—some fleeting, others persistent—and economically sketches their essential traits with admirable precision. However, while he straightforwardly expresses his political viewpoints regarding the will to carry on a protracted conflict against a determined enemy, the tone and thematic arc of the book aren’t quite as well-maintained. At times, the book becomes more of a travelogue with personal reminiscences that, often as not, don’t tie back into the overall narrative. By switching back and forth without apparent tonal or thematic justifications, the book’s overall thrust is diluted. Despite this lack of focus, however, Siemon-Netto’s sharp, intelligible prose and ability to evoke character and mood serve the book well, and many readers looking for a personal, free-form trek through a pivotal time in 20th-century history will be satisfied.
Strong prose and a lively atmosphere keep Siemon-Netto’s memoir from getting bogged down despite its scattered focus.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4949-7040-6
Page Count: 254
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
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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