A worthy and wise successor to one of the best books ever about combat in Vietnam.
To honor fallen comrades, a journalist and a soldier return to Vietnam battlefields more than 30 years later.
Following publication of their bestselling account of 1965’s horrific clash between the U.S. Army and the NVA in Ia Drang Valley (We Were Soldiers Once…and Young: Ia Drang—The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam, 1992), Moore, the battalion commander, and Galloway, the only journalist covering the battle, made a half-dozen trips to Vietnam looking “to walk the old battlefields and put some of our ghosts to rest.” Wisely eschewing talk of “closure” and seeking instead to better understand what had happened, they pointedly searched out anyone with firsthand knowledge, including old enemies. Notwithstanding multiple bureaucratic roadblocks, they sat down with the two senior commanders who had fought against them. They also met many Vietnamese veterans who had taken part in the battle, interviewed Senior General Vo Nguyen Giap, the military architect of Vietnam’s victories over France and America, walked the legendary Dienbienphu battleground (where the French suffered 2,242 killed and 6,463 wounded) and even spent a night on their own storied battlefield. Moore’s voice carries the narrative and his depiction of this evening, including the tiger roars, meteor showers and tears shed recalling events decades old, proves unforgettable. Despite some awkwardness (“You killed my best friend,” one Vietnamese colonel realizes after speaking with an American machine gunner), the authors are struck by the sympathy and understanding offered by their Vietnamese counterparts, by the common experience that separates soldiers, even those once enemies, from all civilians, and by how the countryside has already absorbed and obscured the scars and detritus of war. Chapters on leadership and a salute to another distinguished Ia Drang fighter, though of some interest, would have better been relegated to an appendix, a section that includes moving tributes to Moore’s beloved wife and to Rick Rescorla, another Ia Drang vet who later died on 9/11 leading thousands safely out of the Twin Towers.
A worthy and wise successor to one of the best books ever about combat in Vietnam.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-114776-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
