by William Van Zanten ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1993
Thanks to its rigorous training and discipline, which engenders esprit as well as confidence bordering on cocksureness, the US Marine Corps ranks among the world's greatest fraternities. In this low-key but affecting account of his experiences as a junior officer in the first USMC unit sent to do battle in Vietnam, the author captures much of what makes the brotherhood of the eagle, globe, and anchor such an abiding attachment. Having read Leon Uris's Battle Cry as a teenager in the rural Southwest, Van Zanten knew early on that dress blues were in his future. So gung-ho was the author that he arranged to go through boot camp during the summer before his senior year in high school. While at Arizona State (where he quarterbacked the varsity football team), Van Zanten entered Officer Candidate School. Completing the rigorous course after graduation, he earned a regular (as opposed to reserve) commission. Though recently married, the author was ready and willing to go when his outfit was ordered into action in mid-1965. During his 13-month tour of duty in Vietnam, Van Zanten dealt effectively with the grim business of leading troops into front-line combat. While not always enthralled with the lack of professionalism of a few superiors, he happily served under a Marine Crops Commandant-to-be (General P.X. Kelley, who contributes a moving foreword here) and got on with the dirty job of waging a war redeemed largely, he says, by the fellowship of comrades in arms. An alum's splendid, personal tribute to an elite fighting force.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-208-02347-X
Page Count: 208
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1992
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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