Extraordinary, and likely to become a standard in courses devoted to the history of the Vietnam War.
A sprawling, vivid, and hard-to-put-down account of a mere two days in the fall of 1967, a time of two fierce battles: one in South Vietnam, the other in Wisconsin.
Washington Post reporter Maraniss (When Pride Still Mattered, 1999, etc.) probably wasn’t thinking of James Michener when he set this epic down to paper, but the project certainly has a Michener-esque feel, with its huge cast of characters acting out in the face of great historical forces beyond their control. Maraniss is the more engaging writer, though, and he does a superb job of relating dozens of interwoven but distinct stories in which the obscure and the famous meet. In the Cs alone, for instance, there are William Coleman, a commander; Joe Costello, a grenadier; and Doug Cron, a rifleman—but also activist and actor Peter Coyote, US attorney general Ramsey Clark and his assistant Warren Christopher, and current US Vice President Dick Cheney. The latter, by Maraniss’s account, was busy avoiding the draft at the University of Wisconsin on those bright October days, though he would go on to rattle more than a few sabers. Meanwhile, the real saber-wielders, led by the noted soldier Terry Allen Jr., were busily killing and being killed in a ferocious battle 45 miles northwest of Saigon; some, even as early as 1967, had lost spouses and friends to the antiwar movement, which was gathering strength at the Madison campus, battling such hated symbols of the war as the Dow Chemical company and Lyndon B. Johnson. “There was an emerging awareness,” writes Maraniss of the antiwar activists, “that everything that had been tried to stop the war to that point had failed,” and, now toughened by tear gas and nightsticks, they were ready for the fight they got on the streets of Madison. Off in Vietnam, for their part, the soldiers of the tough-as-nails Black Lions unit were finding a vicious fight of their own—and compromised in that struggle by the leaders, or so many of the surviving soldiers felt. Both battles wrought terrible scars that have still not healed, and Maraniss’s careful narrative shows just why that should be so.
Extraordinary, and likely to become a standard in courses devoted to the history of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-1780-2
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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