Astor (The Voices of D-Day, 1994) presents a moving collection of memoirs of surviving American soldiers, marines, sailors, and airmen who were on the firing line at Okinawa. In 1945, American strategists saw Okinawa as the main staging area for the final assault on Japan. To take this island, US forces paid a terrible price that became a factor in the decision to end the most destructive war in history with the dropping of the atomic bomb: If this four-month battle was so costly, strategists reasoned, invading Japan would be far worse. Americans suffered 49,151 killed, wounded, or missing with over 117,000 Japanese casualties, plus an estimated 100,000 Okinawan civilians killed or wounded. The US fleet lost 36 ships sunk and 368 damaged by kamikaze attacks. Astor, himself a WW II veteran, brings home all the terror, the horrors, and the ugliness of high-adrenalin combat. In line with Tolstoy's belief that battles are won by the efforts of the ordinary soldier, Astor brings us the soldiers' own words: a first sergeant and former sportswriter many of whose men drowned off Guam before the Japanese could even fire at them; a destroyer's commander who saw an ensign die protecting others from a kamikaze attack. He also notes the valor and unselfish nobility of men under savage stress who depended on one another for their very lives, bonding them ever closer—a ``band of brothers'' whose seared memories and pride would never die if they survived. Each man's tale is different, yet has a common thread of life and death in the balance. Astor's account demonstrates that most American servicemen wanted simply to defend their country, get the dirty war over with, and soon return home. An excellent account of the way it was on the front lines in Okinawa 50 years ago: Grim and moving, it is a fitting tribute to all those who served so honorably. (photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 30, 1995
ISBN: 1-55611-425-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Donald Fine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
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
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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