Realistic portraits of four American superheroes.
World War II heroics with a touch of melancholy.
In his latest book of popular World War II history, bestselling author Kershaw tells the stories of four Americans who won the Medal of Honor and lived postwar lives that sometimes kept them in the public eye. The best known is Audie Murphy, diminutive son of a dirt-poor Texas family and an underage enlistee whose spectacular marksmanship and fearless aggression won him not only a host of medals, but a career in Hollywood. He often served under Keith Ware, a captain from Officer Training School who won the medal but also became the first draftee in history to end his career as a general. He played an important role in the Vietnam War before dying in a helicopter crash in 1968. Maurice Britt was playing professional football when he was called up. Seriously injured in 1944, he became “the first American in history to gain every medal for valor in a single war.” Michael Daly entered West Point in 1942, hated its brutal hazing and regimentation, quit, and immediately enlisted as a private, anxious to prove that he had the right stuff. Landing on Omaha Beach on D-Day, he performed feats of bravery until the very end. With a serious facial injury, Daly’s public exposure was minimal, and he lived modestly, dying in 2008. Movie-star handsome, Murphy appeared on the cover of Life, becoming the “Sergeant York” war icon of WWII. Actor James Cagney offered a film contract if he went to acting school and lost his Texas accent. Murphy enjoyed a successful career through the 1950s but had drifted out of the spotlight before dying in a plane crash in 1971. These men fought at the sharp edge, so Kershaw pours out a steady stream of vicious small-unit actions filled with merciless brutality and bloodshed. Some readers may feel the urge to skim some of the mayhem, but the accomplishments of the soldiers shine through.
Realistic portraits of four American superheroes.Pub Date: March 22, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-18374-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton Caliber
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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