Formulaic and self-effacing nearly to a fault—the adventures speak for themselves.
Memoirs of an American pilot during WWII, famous for his escape attempts as a Nazi prisoner.
Born in 1917 and now living in London, Ash has often been mentioned as one of a half-dozen or so Allied POWs who inspired the role created for actor Steve McQueen in the genre movie nonpareil, The Great Escape. Yet, in this somewhat halting narrative, he is careful to point out that no American, in fact, did escape in the daring, tediously organized breakout that became known as The Great Escape. (Ash himself had been moved to another camp prior to the event.) Nonetheless, his resourcefulness in, as he puts it, “diverting Germans from the war effort” in order to repeatedly thwart his escape schemes and clap him in the “cooler” (solitary confinement), is no less heroic. Ash’s hardscrabble youth during the Depression is sketchily recalled but gathers relevance as preparation for later POW ordeals. With a degree “in arts” from the University of Texas, he wanders through hobo jungles in the late ’30s, eventually realizing, although the U.S. remains neutral, that fighting Hitler might be a step up from the treadmill of odd jobs he seems stuck on. He walks from Detroit into Canada, fails his initial physical as a pilot candidate (he was underweight), but bulks up on Depression stew (all-you-can-eat, for a quarter) and is accepted for training on the second try. Arriving in England after the 1940 Battle of Britain, but with plenty of air action ongoing, Ash recalls classic Spitfire duels led by (mostly) British aces who helped him hone his skills until he was shot down in France and survived, sheltered by citizens, until his eventual capture.
Formulaic and self-effacing nearly to a fault—the adventures speak for themselves.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-33832-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
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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