A fresh, well-researched contribution to military and gender history.
As members of the Army’s Signal Corps, women played a critical role in World War I.
In an informative history of women’s military work, Cobbs (Chair, American History/Texas A&M Univ.; The Hamilton Affair, 2016, etc.) focuses on more than 200 telephone operators who supported combat soldiers in Europe soon after the United States entered the war in 1917. For the first time in war, the telephone became the essential form of communication, requiring skilled workers to nimbly manipulate “jacks, sockets, ringers, and buzzers on the boards of busy switching stations.” In the U.S., this job fell to women, who, claims the author, “may possess advantages over males in multitasking.” Since they did not have advantages over males in finding jobs, many opted to become operators, which paid better than most white-collar employment available to women. Besides needing nimble fingers, the Army also needed bilingual operators to communicate with the French military. These volunteers vastly outnumbered those with telephone experience, and they learned technical skills on the job. Closely following a handful of Signal Corps members, Cobbs reveals that they joined partly out of patriotism, partly to seek adventure. All believed they were being inducted into the Army, following the precedent of females welcomed into the Navy and Marines. The Army, though, adamantly maintained that women’s enlistment into the military was “unwise and highly undesirable.” Although outfitted in uniforms, which they purchased themselves, and adhering to military hierarchy, they discovered, after the war ended, that they were not considered to be veterans and not entitled to any postwar benefits. “They had not been soldiers,” the Army insisted, “no matter how many officers had told them, ‘You’re in the army now.’ ” The Army’s refusal persisted until 1979, when 31 survivors finally won a lawsuit. The author’s story of these women’s recruitment, war work, and postwar frustration is stronger than her argument tying their service to the achievement of women’s suffrage, whose political supporters had complicated, often self-serving motives.
A fresh, well-researched contribution to military and gender history.Pub Date: April 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-674-97147-9
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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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