An admiring, inspiring account of how the Army shapes and sharpens the tip of its spear.
A former Navy SEAL takes an inside look at how the Army selects and trains its elite warriors.
Among the American military’s special operations forces none has an older or more distinguished history than the Army Rangers. Couch (Chosen Soldier: The Making of a Special Forces Warrior, 2007, etc.) takes us briefly through these glittering annals, but quickly focuses on the unit’s modern incarnation, the 75th Ranger Regiment, and its preparation of soldiers for their direct-action mission. A light infantry, mobile assault force that typically fights at night, the rapidly deployed Rangers conduct raids designed to kill or capture the enemy, to disrupt his operations, and to seize objectives like airports or embassies. To accomplish this mission, Ranger candidates, recruited from regular Army volunteers, undergo arduous training and merciless evaluation, all levels of which Couch examines. Granted unprecedented access, Couch follows a Ranger class through to its departure for the battlefield. He liberally sprinkles the narrative with interviews of the candidates and their trainers, paying due attention to the specific skills taught—shooting, breaching, mobility, hand-to-hand fighting, fast-roping, etc.—but focusing even more on a complete picture of the unique Ranger culture. The requisite physical fitness, intelligence, mental toughness, ethical maturity, patriotism and cultural suitability of each Ranger are always subject to proof in a regiment where you “have to earn your Scroll every day.” The peer-review process will strike civilians as brutal, but the Rangers’ candid assessment of their fellows, Couch makes clear, is crucial when lives depend on the creativity, cooperation, stability and reliability of each soldier.
An admiring, inspiring account of how the Army shapes and sharpens the tip of its spear.Pub Date: July 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-425-24758-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton Caliber
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012
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 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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