A searing history of the Black experience in Vietnam.
A sharp-edged account of the disastrous Vietnam War as seen through the eyes of its Black fighters.
The author of numerous books of Black history and biography, Haygood begins with the memory of his childhood block, where six close neighbors were dispatched to fight in Vietnam. That anecdotal evidence well illustrates the fact “that in the early years Blacks were disproportionately being sent to the front of the battle lines in Vietnam when compared with whites.” The pattern would continue throughout the war. Like the “Double V” campaign for civil rights during and after World War II, a resistance movement in Vietnam was paralleling events back home. One of his case studies is a young Black major who walked into a press briefing room in Saigon and read a statement that “the American military services are the strongest citadels of racism on the face of the earth.” For his defiant candor, he was forcibly retired from the service. The Black Power movement arrived at the front “with the force of a hurricane,” exemplified by the elaborate handshake called dapping, which began to worry the mostly white officers in charge, concerned that rebellion was being fomented in the ranks. They were right to worry: Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On was spinning on the turntable, Black soldiers were growing their hair in afros and disregarding orders, morale was plummeting, and injustices were mounting. In this wide-ranging survey, Haygood relates any number of terrible stories: a Medal of Honor winner, suffering from PTSD and unable to find work back home, gunned down while attempting to rob a grocery store; a 15-year-old who lied about his age to join the Marines, the youngest American to die in Vietnam; the distinguished doctor whose days were ending in treatment for exposure to Agent Orange.
A searing history of the Black experience in Vietnam.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2026
ISBN: 9780593537695
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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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