An obvious labor of love and the definitive study of a catastrophic shipboard accident.
A retired Navy pilot chronicles the deadly 1966 fire aboard an aircraft carrier off the coast of Vietnam that, though forgotten today, remains a powerful case study of heroism and senseless tragedy.
During a routine stowing of aircraft flares, one sailor tossed a heavy, cylindrical flare to another. Its lanyard caught on something and pulled the pin. In seconds, the sailor who caught it knew that the flare would burst into an intensely hot, magnesium-fueled fire capable of turning night into day. Instead of dropping it or throwing it overboard, he made the worst possible decision: he threw it into the flare locker, where it ignited 640 others. Within minutes, an uncontrollable fire engulfed the forward end of the carrier, killing 44 crewmen. Foster, who served on the Oriskany, describes precisely how the fire spread, how its victims died, and how the remaining crew mobilized and fought the blaze. Having interviewed almost everyone involved, the author includes many stories of heroism, miraculous escapes, and tragic failures. After the fire came the inevitable investigation, which took a month, filled 11 volumes, and blamed the accident on lax supervision and unsafe working conditions, singling out a half-dozen crewmembers. In the end, almost everyone got off lightly. The sailors who started the blaze received mild punishment, and all court-martials resulted in acquittals. However, following Navy tradition, the carrier’s captain bore ultimate responsibility, and his career was ruined. Foster describes in minuscule detail the daily routine, operation, emergency procedures, and chain of command on an aircraft carrier. There may be more than a general reader wants to know, but the incident provides plenty of excitement, and Foster writes well enough to make it worth the effort.
An obvious labor of love and the definitive study of a catastrophic shipboard accident.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-55750-290-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2001
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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