Do we need another history of Iwo Jima? Not when it’s this reverential tome with little new to add.
A competent account of the key World War II battle.
Military historian Warren (American Spartans: The U.S. Marines: A Combat History from Iwo Jima to Iraq, 2005, etc.) intermixes his narrative of the origins and conduct of the fighting with the reminiscences of veteran Haynes, who survived five weeks of brutal fighting on the Japanese island. Haynes was an officer in the Marines’ 3,250-man Combat Team 28, which landed at Iwo Jima on February 19, 1945. Its assignment was to capture Mount Suribachi, a four-day achievement immortalized in the famous flag-raising photograph but followed by another month of deadly fighting. Activated a year earlier, Combat Team 28 included only 40 percent combat veterans, but eight months of intense training under experienced senior officers (all given admiring mini-biographies) produced a superbly disciplined organization that never lost its élan in the face of massive casualties. Despite the Marines’ superb training and brave leadership, Iwo Jima was an exercise in mutual slaughter, a mind-numbing series of brutal small-unit actions characterized by courage, endurance and carnage on both sides that proceeded relentlessly until the last Japanese died. The authors work hard to include anecdotes, colorful characters and philosophical musings, so military buffs will have no trouble finishing the book. The average reader, however, may decide at some point that enough is enough. One sign that Iwo Jima has entered its final resting place as a glorious national myth is the authors’ admiring portrait of the enemy; they extol commanding General Kuribayashi for his brilliant defense and praise his soldiers, who refused to surrender. Readers wondering why America’s current opponents in the Middle East are labeled suicidal fanatics, while Japanese who fought to the death in 1945 were valiant warriors, can take dubious comfort from the fact that our parents called the Japanese fanatics, and our children may possibly call jihadists valiant warriors.
Do we need another history of Iwo Jima? Not when it’s this reverential tome with little new to add.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8325-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: John Macrae/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
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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