An exciting narrative of a naval showdown revealing hubris and humility on both sides.
Nicely dramatized story of the monster Japanese submarines that were trained on the American mainland at the end of World War II.
Aviation scholar, researcher and journalist Geoghegan has scoured the archives to present a little-touted facet of Japanese naval history that offers a fascinating glimpse into the workings of the Japanese mindset at the endgame of the war. After Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto engineered the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, his next gambling idea was to bomb American cities so that “the American people [would] surely lose their will to fight.” A superfuel-carrying submarine that could double as an aircraft carrier was needed for such an ambitious, risky enterprise, and thus, a series of I-400 supersubs came under intensive design and construction well into 1943. While the Japanese were flirting with other bombing raids over the Oregon coast, time was running out; the Americans scored victory at Midway, among others, and Yamamoto had been ambushed, forcing a scale back of the I-400s; yet completing the first supersubs became a point of honor, even as the tide was turning for the Axis powers. Special attack planes called Seiran were tested to accompany the pair of subs, which were finally ready by January 1945. Geoghegan pursues the fate of the I-401 on its last mission in August 1945, manned by the incompatible pair of commanders Nobukiyo Nambu and Tatsunosuke Ariizumi, for whom the news of the Japanese emperor’s capitulation prompted two competing reactions as the sub was pursued by the American patrol sub Segundo, skippered by the young commander, Stephen Lobdell Johnson, who was “brash with a cockiness that put his crew on edge.”
An exciting narrative of a naval showdown revealing hubris and humility on both sides.Pub Date: March 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-307-46480-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2013
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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