A useful resource for serious students of World War II.
An in-depth account of the denouement of the Pacific phase of World War II.
WWII veteran and historian Heinrichs (Emeritus, History/San Diego State Univ.; Threshold of War: Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Entry into World War II, 1988, etc.) and Gallicchio (History/Villanova Univ.; The Scramble for Asia: U.S. Military Power in the Aftermath of the Pacific War, 2008, etc.) begin in early 1944, as American forces began to shift from containment of Japanese advance to a sustained offensive. The goals were twofold: recovering territory lost in the initial Japanese expansion and forcing a Japanese capitulation. Several factors complicated the process: the determination of the Japanese to fight to the last man; the continuing war on the European front; rivalries between the Army and Navy; and the political situation at home. The authors give each due consideration. Descriptions of the battles make it clear how high the cost of the Japanese strategy was. In most of the battles, the Americans faced well-sited defensive positions designed to extract as many casualties as possible. Only toward the end of the war did significant numbers of Japanese troops surrender, but at the same time, the kamikaze attacks were causing enormous damage to the American fleet. Meanwhile, the European war’s demands for personnel and supplies limited the resources available to the U.S. commanders in the Pacific, who were already at odds over how best to prepare for the apparently inevitable invasion of Japan. Back in the U.S., much energy was being expended on the questions of how to quickly return to a peacetime economy and how to return the veterans of Europe’s war to their civilian lives. Harry Truman and his new administration wrestled with these issues, which were exacerbated by a sense that the population would not support a drawn-out siege of Japan. The authors’ handling of these questions, which ultimately led to the atomic bombing of Japan, is more interesting than their sometimes-ponderous coverage of the battles. Substantial documentation, much of it from Japanese sources, adds value.
A useful resource for serious students of World War II.Pub Date: June 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-19-061675-5
Page Count: 728
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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