Not just another coffee-table picture book on World War II, but a collection of graphic art accompanied by James Jones' whittlings at his Schtick. As a whole, the paintings and drawings—accompanied by only a modicum of Sad Sack cartoons and period pinups—are remarkably mediocre and inexpressive. Howard Brodie's famous sketches of combat seem staged; the frankly propagandistic works like "Rosie the Riveter" bear an unsettling resemblance to socialist realism or Nazi graphics. Watercolors and charcoal serve the war reportage best—a sketch of shell shock at least evokes Goya, the watercolors capture some of the flux of battle. A pencil drawing of hiroshima flatness says more than a photo. Yet one concludes that photography serves as a far more powerful art form in the war theater. Jones, for his part, provides canny reassessments of battles and pseudo-ironic: macho anecdotes. He also suggests that American soldiers had no motivation but primordial love of war, and maunders about how history ignores the hairy lower-class soldier. Critics will have something to say about artists and works left out (perhaps the omission of Aaron Bohrod is no loss); the book poses absorbing problems as to why 20th century wars in general have produced no great art, and why these particular achievements are so impacted as reportage or creation. A certain seller nevertheless.
Pub Date: Sept. 10, 1975
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1975
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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