A very human story of “bravery, sacrifice, incredible hardship, horror, and ultimate victory.”
One of the U.S. Marine Corps’ finest—yet largely untold—stories.
By the fall of 2006, al-Qaida in Iraq had been largely cornered in the western province known as Al Anbar. However, as veteran military writer Darack (War Moments: Images & Stories of Combat in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Beyond, 2019, etc.) writes, they were battle-hardened, well-equipped, vicious, and desperate, and they decided to dig in and throw everything they had at the “invading” Americans. They embedded themselves among the narrow, twisting streets of Haditha (population 25,000) and intimidated the locals into cooperating by murdering anyone they thought supported America. They would place their decapitated victims’ heads on stakes that they planted around the city for the public to see. As one lance corporal recalled, “it wasn’t hell…it was worse than hell. I know it sounds cliché, but nothing could be that bad. It was beyond my worst, most horrific nightmares.” Striking and withdrawing over and over, they also set mines on the roads on which Marine convoys traveled. It was against this background that the 2nd Battalion of the 3rd Marine Regiment arrived with orders to drive out the terrorists, a monumental, highly dangerous task. The author, who has embedded with American troops multiple times in both Afghanistan and Iraq, tells the story battle by battle, often in gripping, brutal, and sometimes-gruesome detail. However, this book is more than a typical war story. To defeat al-Qaida in Iraq, the Marines realized they would have to win the locals’ trust, which they did in imaginative ways. For example, on Halloween, soldiers went trick-or-treating through Haditha neighborhoods and gave candy to children. The only real weakness of the text is Darack’s excessive use of Marine acronyms (TTP, AO, COC, BATS, SVBIED, etc.), which will become tiresome for civilian readers without a military background.
A very human story of “bravery, sacrifice, incredible hardship, horror, and ultimate victory.”Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-306-92265-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
HISTORY | MODERN | MILITARY | 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 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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