Just as well-researched and -written as the first volume, this story of how air and submarine power replaced the Navy’s...
The second volume of naval historian Toll’s Pacific War trilogy (Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific: 1941-1942, 2011, etc.).
The author’s interspersing of personal tales of World War II with the official histories not only brings the action to life, but also clarifies certain facts advanced in personal memoirs. Focusing on the theater led by Chester Nimitz, Toll conscientiously presents characterizations of the Navy, Air Force, and Marine leaders. The divisions of the Pacific theater between the Army and Navy resulted from Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s demands for sole leadership, and the bitter rivalries between the services plagued leaders throughout the war, greatly affecting communications and targets. The author devotes a considerable portion of the book to the battle for Guadalcanal, as the fighter and bomber squadrons and naval bombardments paved the way for amphibious landings. With almost as much information about the Japanese leaders as the Americans, Toll’s wide view of the Pacific war is enlightening. He lauds the submariners whose primary job was to eliminate Japanese provisioning by sinking merchant shipping and tankers. The policy of hopscotching islands sped up Allied victories, and they avoided invading chosen islands, using bombardment and aerial bombing to neutralize them. The decisive capture of the Marianas in July 1944 signaled the end of Japan’s war, but it would take another year to convince them. Toll provides a solid picture of the mindset of the Japanese: their horror of surrender, their rigidity in operational procedures, which made them easy to predict, the rivalries that far surpassed those of the Allies, and the obdurate demands of Emperor Hirohito to fight to the death.
Just as well-researched and -written as the first volume, this story of how air and submarine power replaced the Navy’s reliance on battleships is an education for all and an enjoyable read in the bargain.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-393-08064-3
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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