Of most interest to military history buffs and students of the air war in the Pacific.
A well-paced, action-packed narrative of a minor episode in WWII that had major results.
Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, writes journalist/historian Davis, initially opposed going to war against the US; he had attended Harvard, spoke English, and had traveled here widely enough to know that “when the threat was great enough, common Americans would fight, and die, for their country.” Yet, obedient to the emperor and the high command, Yamamoto threw himself into preparations for the attack on Pearl Harbor, which was meant to follow immediately the Japanese ambassador’s delivery in Washington of a declaration of war. The ambassador fell behind schedule, however, to Yamamoto’s enduring shame; he had not wanted a sneak attack, in which there was no honor. American military intelligence took a different view, rightly pegging Yamamoto as the architect of not only Pearl Harbor but also the Imperial Navy’s formidable campaign in the Pacific. Davis’s account turns on five Army Air Corps pilots who were recruited into a group that came to be called the “Cactus Air Force,” whose members performed countless deeds of bravery and even heroism in combat, in one instance turning the tide of battle at Guadalcanal even as they flew against technically superior Japanese aircraft. (“About the only way a P-400 could shoot down a Zero,” the author comments, “was with the help of a Japanese pilot.” Davis sometimes lets anecdotes do the work of analysis, but his central narrative moves swiftly and surely as the American flyers, armed with broken Japanese codes, mount a daring effort to find Yamamoto’s command plane and bring it down. The outcome is well known to students of WWII history, but—as always seems the case in matters military—the official account of what happened differs in critical details from the accounts of the pilots, which lends immediacy to Davis’s arguments concerning evidence and confirmation.
Of most interest to military history buffs and students of the air war in the Pacific.Pub Date: March 17, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-30906-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2004
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
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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