Hallahan's polemic against internal regulations within the national armaments industry is also a history of America's war machine since the founding of the Springfield Arsenal during the Revolution. Because the British had forbidden manufacture of muskets and ammunition in the colonies, the Americans had to invent an irregular form of warfare based on guerrilla tactics that made the best use of limited amounts of precious ammunition. The Revolutionary War demonstrated the effectiveness of the rifle, used as a sniper's weapon from long rage and from behind cover, over the bayoneted musket favored by the British. The rifle triumphed. But Edgar Awardwinning mystery writer turned military historian Hallahan's (Tripletrap, 1989, etc.) thesis, in germ, is that an obsession with conserving ammunition was to dominate American small-arms thinking for the next two centuries, resulting in the M- 16, which fires in economical bursts of three to five shells but which is outgunned by the continuously firing Kalashnikov. GIs found this a murderous disability in Vietnam, where they often abandoned their M-16s in favor of the Russian weapon. Ultimately, of course, Hallahan's target is the sclerotic, tradition-bound mentality of military establishments in general. We see the evolution of the US Ordnance Corps from its inception by the ebullient Henry Knox, the brilliant artillery engineer of the Revolution, and follow its aggrandizement into the arena of modern warfare, where the ``fixed tradition'' of the ``grave-belly long- range sharpshooter'' persisted. Hallahan guides the reader with a sure hand through the obscure but somehow ghoulishly intriguing complexities of weapons logistics: the creation, for example, of Earle Harvey's T-25 automatic rifle after WW II becomes, in the author's hands, a psychological and Cold War political thriller. Such dramatic narrative is unexpected in a book devoted to a subject that would at first appear to be of interest only to West Point cadets and jarheads. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 17, 1994
ISBN: 0-684-19359-0
Page Count: 578
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
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
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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