In an engrossing tale of unsung heroes and high-risk missions, military historian Breuer (Feuding Allies, 1995, etc.) penetrates the little-known espionage, propaganda, and guerilla operations of the Korean war. When well-equipped, Soviet trained North Korean troops crossed the 38th parallel on June 15, 1950, in what Breuer calls a ``second Pearl Harbor,'' the overmatched South Korean defenders were quickly driven into a small pocket in southeastern Korea called the Pusan Peninsula. There they held fast, with the emergency support of newly arrived (but inexperienced) American troops. The covert war began almost immediately. General Douglas MacArthur's special warfare unit spread disinformation before his surprise landing at Inchon in the enemy rear. Army and CIA units trained many South Koreans and sent them North to spy and to carry out guerrilla operations, often with great success. Yet the North Koreans and their Chinese allies had their covert victories, too. Communist forces often seemed to know when and where the UN forces would attack. Breuer tracks these leaks back to the highly placed British traitors Philby, Burgess, and MacLean, who sent copies of US plans to Moscow. And the Communist propaganda machine lied so effectively about American ``atrocities'' that some countries demanded investigations, while, Breuer reveals, the Communist military tortured and killed POWs (including Americans) and civilians. While China and the Soviet Union were officially neutral in the war's early days, Breuer finds that Chinese and Soviet soldiers and airmen (with their equipment and supplies) were covertly available to the North Koreans, as they were later to the Communists in North Vietnam. Built on personal interviews and sound secondary research, Breuer's account should please both students of modern military history and espionage enthusiasts. (30 photos, maps)
Pub Date: May 17, 1996
ISBN: 0-471-14438-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1996
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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