These inspirational tales cover as many Marine experiences as Brady can pack in.
Official blather, cruel truths and occasional eloquence by Marine veterans of all wars, as told to Brady (The Scariest Place in the World: A Marine Returns to North Korea, 2005, etc.).
The author polls his own buddies from the Korean War, as well as gathering numerous voices solicited from an article he wrote in Leatherneck magazine, to answer the straightforward question: Why do Marines fight? Discipline—first gained at boot camp—is a common answer, as is the sense of a team and the pressure to enlist, especially if the father was also a military man. Brady includes the story of the privileged soldier, exemplified by Yale student John Chafee, who enlisted in 1942 and later served in Korea, becoming the author’s commanding officer and later a senator. He also looks at the humble soldier, like Jim “Wild Hoss” Callan, a country boy from New Mexico who hoped his military pay could help save the family’s beef ranch before he was killed in Korea. There’s a canned tale from Sen. John Warner of Virginia, as well as the moving account of Gonzalo Garza, a Texas soldier with Mexican immigrant parents. Gen. Peter Pace became the first Marine to be named chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly grew up amid gang violence in the city, joined the Marines like his three older brothers and then became a cop. Fortunately, Brady doesn’t completely whitewash the language of these hard-nosed vets—take George Howe’s account of fighting in North China in 1936 and watching “Marines pulling gold teeth out of the Jap mouths with pliers.” Combat engineer Cpt. Lauren Edwards, formerly stationed in Iraq, provides the lone female voice.
These inspirational tales cover as many Marine experiences as Brady can pack in.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-312-37280-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2007
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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