A tender, loving account of a short but honorable life.
Walker collects the letters his uncle sent home from Europe while serving in World War II.
In 1924, Fletcher “Bud” Blanton was born in Horry County, South Carolina, and grew up accustomed to back-breaking work on a tobacco farm. In 1944, he was drafted into the United States Army as war engulfed Europe. He became a member of Company D, 413th Infantry, which was part of the 104th Infantry Division, informally known as the Timberwolves. He would serve on the battlefields of France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany. During the Battle of the Bulge, a little over two months into his deployment, he was killed; apparently, he was hit by a mortar shell while on guard duty. In 2022, the author, Bud’s nephew, stumbled upon a packet of letters Blanton sent home (including photographs) with a note from Walker’s long-dead father imploring him not to discard the contents. The author dutifully complied and found a wealth of information that brought clarity to his uncle’s short and somewhat inscrutable life. The discovery was one of great historical and emotional value, a point movingly observed by Walker: “Now, in my seventh decade, with far fewer years ahead than behind me, my uncle’s letters provided the most poignant reminder of service to country I had ever known, the letters from the one soldier whose wartime experience is an inseparable part of my own heritage.”
The author, who served as a reporter and editor for Stars and Stripes for more than 30 years, uses the letters as a springboard to craft a more comprehensive historical account, which includes the experiences of Bud’s family both before and after his death. He also furnishes brief biographical vignettes of several of the men who also served in the Timberwolves, astutely sketching a portrait of the common soldier. The letters themselves are the highlight of the book; Bud was a naturally “jolly” person, and a touch wild, too, but his experience of war, as short as his time overseas was, matured him profoundly. One letter he dispatched after being sent to the front makes this point affectingly: “I am about to realize what the war is all about,” he writes; “I often think about how lucky some of the people back home are an about how foolish I used to do when I was back home.” Walker captures not only Bud’s deepening character, but also his terrible loneliness away from home—he often pleaded with his seven brothers and sisters to write to him, and he would send as many as three letters a day to his girlfriend, Dot Floyd, back in the United States. The author’s speculations regarding what Bud’s life might have been like had he survived are heartbreaking—all of his options were waylaid by “those unpredictable characters called love and luck and fate.” This is a touching homage to a soldier who made the ultimate sacrifice for his country.
A tender, loving account of a short but honorable life.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9781643365022
Page Count: 224
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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