A sympathetic, exciting portrait of both American and Japanese warriors caught up in “targeted-kill operations.”
An evenhanded history of the hunt for the mastermind of the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.
Nearly a year and a half after the U.S. declared war on Japan, the Army Air Forces would finally catch up with Japanese Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, commander in chief of the Imperial Japanese Navy, in the skies over the then-Japanese-held islands of Rabaul and Bougainville. Lehr—a professor of journalism at Boston University who has written two books on Whitey Bulger—weaves together two touching stories: the tale of Maj. John Mitchell, who was an ace flyboy chosen to lead the mission, homesick for his new bride, as well as the story of Mitchell’s team; and the chronicle of Yamamoto, who, as a young cadet, had seen his country prevail against the Russians in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and became a forward-thinking officer who attended Harvard, worked two postings in Washington, D.C., and—significantly—grasped that aircraft carriers were the weapon of the future. Yamamoto also “sensed…from a mix of press accounts and military intelligence, that the United States was waking up—that following the deadly Pearl Harbor debacle, instead of curling up into a fetal position, she was climbing to her feet, raring to fight and seek vengeance. [He] had no way of knowing its full extent, but the winter of 1942 saw the [U.S.] hastily and effectively establish its wartime footing.” By 1943, he was nearing 60, with a wife and children as well as a longtime geisha lover to whom he wrote passionate letters. Refreshingly, Lehr gets beyond the hate-filled, racist propaganda on both sides to give an honest appraisal of the protagonists, especially Yamamoto, whose logic in attacking Pearl Harbor was to “induce [America] to settle for peace with Japan.” Once the Americans cracked the Japanese code, Midway became “Yamamoto’s lament.”
A sympathetic, exciting portrait of both American and Japanese warriors caught up in “targeted-kill operations.” (b/w photos)Pub Date: May 12, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-244851-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
HISTORY | MODERN | MILITARY | UNITED STATES | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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