A mostly compelling, long-overdue saga of the famous ship.
A forgotten chapter of heroism, brutality and survival from the opening days of World War II.
The USS Houston, famed for ferrying FDR on several voyages, was on the wrong side of the Pacific when World War II broke out. The fate of the ship and her crew has never been fully revealed until now. Battered and on the run after several skirmishes in the opening weeks of the war, the Houston was looking for shelter. Just after 11:30 at night, on Feb. 28, 1942, the Houston and the Australian cruiser Perth sailed into the Sunda Strait off the coast of Java. Their arrival coincided with the landing of a massive Japanese army on the island. Against overwhelming odds, the two ships battled for more than an hour before they were sunk. Those who survived were captured and taken to Singapore, but that was only the beginning of their nightmare. The prisoners were put to work in what would become an infamous stretch of jungle, the Burma-Thailand Railway, basis for the epic The Bridge on the River Kwai. Though the Perth and Houston survivors shared the same experience, the author focuses on the Houston crew. As in Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors (2004), personal accounts from survivors make vivid the brutal experience. Scattered by the current, some sailors were immediately captured, while others evaded the enemy for days or weeks. Back home, families waited for news that never came. The multiple points-of-view presented here occasionally become confusing, but when the survivors arrive at the jungle prison, the author ties the separate threads into a gripping narrative. Harrowing and frank, this story of a gritty band of men—starved, isolated and working under excruciating conditions—reflects the triumph of will over adversity.
A mostly compelling, long-overdue saga of the famous ship.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2006
ISBN: 0-553-80390-5
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2006
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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