A worthy read for aviation and military-history buffs.
Pilot, patriot, and popinjay: a thoroughgoing account of Billy Mitchell’s now-forgotten fall from grace.
WWI aviator and hero Billy Mitchell smarted when, instead of being given command of the Army’s air branch, he was reduced in rank and shipped off to a post in Texas. “In Washington, he had a platoon of air officers as loyal to him as disciples to a prophet,” writes Time correspondent Waller (Big Red, 2001, etc.). “His staff now consisted of two clerks and a stenographer.” Insisting, as he would for the rest of his life, that he be called General Mitchell, he went on the offensive soon after the Navy dirigible Shenandoah crashed in a storm over Ohio, releasing a scathing report to the press that criticized the military leadership’s aviation policy, “dictated by non-flying officers of the army and navy who know practically nothing about it.” For his pains, Mitchell was hauled up before the brass for insubordination, and his trial commanded headlines for weeks in 1925. Waller points to the justice of some of Mitchell’s complaints and to the correctness of many of his military theories—some developed on an eight-month tour of Asia in 1923, after which he wrote a report predicting that Kapan would one day attack the US at Pearl Harbor, and, moreover, that the attack would begin at 7:30 a.m. with a swarm of fighter planes, a “scenario . . . eerily similar to what actually happened eighteen years later.” But, working with long-buried transcripts, Waller also puts some black marks next to Mitchell’s name: he was a martinet; he stole some of his bestselling book, Winged Defense, from an army report that, to make matters worse, was still classified. In the end, convicted, Mitchell resigned his commission, though he remained a public hero, especially when WWII began and his complaints about the lack of preparation of the US armed forces were proven true.
A worthy read for aviation and military-history buffs.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-050547-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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 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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