An expert account for fans of military history.
With half a dozen accounts of the U.S. Navy under his belt, award-winning naval historian Hornfischer does not disappoint with his latest.
Following Japan’s surrender, American ships transitioned smoothly into the massive job of carrying home several million soldiers and “mothballing” nearly 2,000 ships. However, by the end of the year, naval leaders confronted a life-and-death battle, as Congress was considering a bill to unify the Navy and Army under a single leader. That it might save money and increase efficiency was little comfort to Navy admirals, certain that the Navy was the nation’s first line of defense, and they persuaded Congress that it must continue to stand alone. Hornfischer takes the Navy’s side, emphasizing that “it was control of the sea that made every other dimension of national power possible. America was the only nation to have that capacity.” Despite the temporary shrinkage, America’s Navy dwarfed all others and controlled the world’s sea lanes throughout this period and into the present day. The Soviet Union never attempted to compete, and the absence of a world war does not mean the absence of fireworks. The author delivers plenty, although many were political or technological. Most experts assumed that future wars would be nuclear, but they were wrong, and Hornfischer offers adept accounts of atomic tests and the Navy’s creation of a nuclear strike force. Readers will enjoy the history of the atomic submarine but may scratch their heads over an interesting but overlong story about the 1949 sinking of the diesel submarine Cochino. The author’s well-rendered chronicle of the Korean War may be one of the first to focus on the Navy. He holds a low opinion of the Air Force’s preference for strategic bombing, which wreaked havoc behind the lines but often left Army units begging in vain for help. Long accustomed to working closely with the Marines, carrier-based planes provided them accurate, often lifesaving air support.
An expert account for fans of military history.Pub Date: May 3, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-399-17864-1
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
HISTORY | MILITARY | UNITED STATES | WORLD
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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